Electronic Book Review - nietzschehttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/nietzsche
enOne or Many Gombrowicz&#8217;s?http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/internetnation/formalist
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Michael Goddard</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1999-01-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>Gombrowicz and Reception</h2>
<p>Considered by many Polish critics as the most important Twentieth Century Polish writer, Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69), remains relatively little known in the English speaking world. Nevertheless, his experimentation with “form,” not only in literature but also in the way he lived his life, makes his work particularly resonant with contemporary questions of aesthetics, desire, and subjectivity. What is particularly evident in both these recent responses to his work is a dynamic relationship between Gombrowicz’s literary production, contemporary theory, and social and cultural practices, especially through the subversion of national and sexual identity. In order to situate the various responses to Gombrowicz contained in these two volumes, it is necessary first to indicate some of his work’s reception history both in Poland and elsewhere in order to underline the already multiple and complex nature of Gombrowicz as a literary and cultural phenomenon.</p>
<p>Reception was a feature of Gombrowicz’s work from its very beginnings; after entitling his first collection of stories <span class="booktitle">Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity</span>, he was accused by contemporary literary critics of the very immaturity he had indicated in the title of his collection. Incensed by this critical response, Gombrowicz went on the offensive in his next and most influential work, the novel <span class="booktitle">Ferdydurke</span>, which was conceived primarily as a counter-attack against these “literary Aunts,” whom he satirised through the memorable and infantilising figure of the pedagogue Professor T. Pimko.</p>
<p>These polemics against his critics were only the beginning of the complexities of Gombrowicz’s reception, which took place in diverse cultural and literary contexts. For example, whereas his first novel <span class="booktitle">Ferdydurke</span> was considered as an avant-gardist expression of intoxication by pre-war literary critics, in the context of the post-war People’s Republic of Poland it was read as the epitome of sobriety and a cogent critique of totalitarian regimes of power. Similarly in the France of the late 1960’s, Gombrowicz could be read as both the uncanny precursor to May 1968, particularly through his affirmation of youth and immaturity, and as the spearhead of a right-wing, libertarian rejection of all forms of collectivity in the name of the sovereign individual, especially by Dominique De Roux (1978, 1996). Throughout his career Gombrowicz was seen as resonant with diverse intellectual movements such as psychoanalysis and phenomenology, and as a precursor to existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism. As Jean-Pierre Salgas puts it, Gombrowicz’s relations to contemporary intellectual trends can be summed up by the formula “J’etais… avant tout le monde” (Salgas 2000: 217-234). What is significant about this reception history, is both the multiplicity of Gombrowicz’s work, the fact that it can be seen as embodying diverse and sometimes directly opposed political or intellectual positions, and its proximity to contemporary developments in thought itself. While Gombrowicz was always an artist, rather than a philosopher, his work develops out of a strong engagement with the history of philosophy and is inscribed in the intersection between literature, philosophy, and socio-cultural practices in a particularly hybrid way as is evidenced by the series of “lectures” he gave on the history of philosophy towards the end of his life (Gombrowicz 1995).</p>
<h2><span class="booktitle">Gombrowicz’s Grimaces</span>: Aesthetics, Exile and Provocations</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">Gombrowicz’s Grimaces</span> is usefully divided into three sections, which help to identify three dimensions of his work or rather three domains of critical intervention with it. In the first section “Aesthetics,” the essays engage with “formal” aspects, which in the case of Gombrowicz entails not merely the pre-existent concept of literary form but rather various critical approaches to Gombrowicz’s interrogation of form itself.</p>
<p>Tomislav Longinović focuses on the strategies at play not in Gombrowicz’s literary works but in the series of interviews he did with Dominique De Roux towards the end of his life entitled <span class="booktitle">A Kind of Testament</span>. The intimate relations between Gombrowicz’s work and the history of philosophy are emphasised by Longonović, who compares this work to Nietzsche’s <span class="booktitle">Ecce Homo</span>. However, Longinović is more interested in what he calls “strategies of formal abjection” (Ziarek 33ff) present throughout Gombrowicz’s work and which he relates to Julia Kristeva’s conception of the abject. Essentially, these strategies involve the subversion of subjectivity so that the authorial “I” is deprived of its stability and authority in favour of a much more mobile and ungrounded form of identity. As Longinović points out, the question of identity, of the “I” in Gombrowicz is intimately bound up with that of form: “Gombrowicz’s testament is shaped by the struggle to formulate the ‘I’ according to the authorial desire that is placed in perpetual conflict with established forms” (Ziarek 35). However, the strength of Longinović’s analysis is that he doesn’t merely reduce Gombrowicz to Kristeva’s terms but rather shows how his exploration of abjection takes in completely different dimensions, particularly through his experiences of exile, homosexuality and immersion in the world of impoverished Argentinian youth.</p>
<p>Also in this section is Dorota Głowacka’s treatment of the tensions between Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz, the writer whom Gombrowicz and his critics have regarded as his closest contemporary. Their relations, however, were far from a cosy mutual adoration society, and part of what Głowacka presents is a fascinating piece of intellectual history concerning the humorous yet serious polemics between the two writers that took place in the avant-garde journal <span class="booktitle">Studio</span>. Głowacka’s reading of this seemingly inconsequential debate, uncovers fundamental differences related to the different cultural traditions inherited by the two writers, namely Polishness and Jewishness: for example whereas as Schulz’s fiction presents a fascination for the magical power of the written word, embodied both in the figure of the primordial Book, as well as in Schulz’s own style, Gombrowicz’s aesthetic aims for a destruction and demystification of this power in favour of the raw or even banal forms of life that are covered over by poetic literary conventions. As Głowacka puts it, “Gombrowicz inflates form from within until it quivers and allows for a transient moment of ‘flight from form,’ while Schulz presses upon it from the outside, inundating it with leftovers it has itself discarded or excreted” (79). In the end we have not merely the contrast between two distinct traditions but a very contemporary analysis of their intertwining, and how via these two visionary writers, they achieve markedly different, yet interacting modes of expression.</p>
<p>In the middle section of the book, a variety of approaches are taken specifically to the relations between Gombrowicz’s work, modernity, and exile. This includes a detailed analysis of Gombrowicz’s exile in Argentina and his (non)-relation to Argentinian literature by Marzena Grzegorczyk, which points out his paradoxical effect on avant-garde Argentinian literature. For Grzegorczyk, Gombrowicz’s exile in Argentina was essential for his development of the concept of Form, since it enabled him to develop a new understanding of Polish culture as a related `secondary’ culture with a distinctly different relation to national form than cultures emerging out of France or Germany. While not assimilating the experience of being on the margins of Europe to the postcolonial context of Latin America, for Gombrowicz, the latter was a liberating force, allowing the minoritarian nature of Polishness to emerge more clearly. Grzegorczyk points out how this national specificity is expressed in Gombrowicz’s deliberate adoption of the discarded aesthetics of the Polish Baroque, which he transformed into a kind of “garbage aesthetics” (142ff) particularly resonant with the literary situation of a country like Argentina.</p>
<p>Gombrowicz’s singular mode of being an exile is taken up also by Piotr Parlej; after all, going back to the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, exile has been almost a Polish literary tradition. However, Gombrowicz’s experience of exile seems to preclude rather than intensify what Parlej identifies as the Polish tendency towards lyricism. For Parlej, nearly all contemporary Polish dissident writers adopted a kind of anti-dialectical lyricism, in order to escape the orbit of the communist regime, which fed off a corrupted version of Hegelian dialectics; for Zbigniew Herbert, for example, the assertion of “good taste” (161) is sufficient to distance oneself both from the regime and from any potential criticism. Gombrowicz, in contrast, rather than leaving the dialectic to its transformation into hollow political rhetoric, seeks to re-invent it through a collision of opposites in a dynamic process of re-invention. Hence the dialectic as embodied in Gombrowicz’s key concepts of form and immaturity is not so much Hegelian as Nietzschean, or even as Parlej points out a Foucauldian interplay of competing but contingent forces rather than stable oppositions (169ff). According to Parlej, by means of this reworking of the dialectic Gombrowicz is able to maintain an intellectual rigour, fully adapted to the uncertainties of modern conditions, which is beyond the reach of the writers who take the easier option of dissident lyricism.</p>
<p>The final and most controversial section of the book deals with Gombrowicz’s relation to queer and national problematics and indeed it is his provocative linking of these two domains that is arguably his most original contribution to modern dilemmas of subjectivity and desire. Not surprisingly, this is the section of the book that has posed the most problems of translation back into the Polish context in both a literal and figurative sense: not only is there no precise Polish equivalent for both the word and the cultural politics designated by `Queer,’ but this term itself embodies the strange relationship between the North American and Polish literary and cultural contexts.</p>
<p>Allen Kuharski’s essay, for example, explicitly claims Gombrowicz as a “queer voice in Polish literature” (267). Finding evidence for this assertion is not difficult: both in Gombrowicz’s <span class="booktitle">Diary</span> (1988: 89, 93), especially when he writes of his Argentinian experiences, and in the works that transform these experiences into literature, in which there is a singular lack of or derision of heterosexual couplings, and a constant vein of homoeroticism. For Kuharski, it is not merely a case of finding these instances but pointing out a whole logic of queer performativity that while traversing all of Gombrowicz’s work is particularly evident in his theatre. This emphasis on performativity draws parallels between Gombrowicz’s approach to performance, and contemporary theories of gender as performativity such as those of Judith Butler, and is a very telling example of the relevance of Gombrowicz’s aesthetics to contemporary problematics of gender and desire. What is most controversial about Kuharski’s essay however, particularly for Polish critics, is Kuharski’s reading of Gombrowicz’s “confessions” of homosexuality in his <span class="booktitle">Diary</span> (142) in relation to the memories of Gombrowicz’s friend Virgilio Pinera as retold in Reinaldo Arenas’ <span class="booktitle">Before Night Falls</span>. The play of intertextuality is very dense here; not only are there the conflicting accounts between an avowedly “artificial” and at times fictional journal and the memories of a flamboyant raconteur retold in the form of a historical fiction, but there is also further interpenetration of art and life in that Piñera was the model for the explicitly homosexual character in Gombrowicz’s novel <span class="booktitle">Trans-Atlantyk</span>. Yet there is also a sense in which Kuharski at this point seems to be outing Gombrowicz, a gesture which runs the risk of undermining the gender complexity of the rest of his essay.</p>
<p>Finally, Ewa Ziarek’s complex essay on Gombrowicz’s most explicitly queer novel, <span class="booktitle">Trans-Atlantyk</span>, brings these problematics of a queer reading of Gombrowicz into relation with some of the earlier essays by emphasising Gombrowicz’s recourse to the Polish Baroque and the relations between queer subjecitivty and the experience of exile (215). One crossing point of these domains is in Gombrowicz’s use of a re-worked Polish Baroque style in <span class="booktitle">Trans-Atlantyk</span>. Ziarek points out that this was not an arbitrary choice but a conscious strategy, in which the politics of nationalism is criticised through “juxtaposing the modern experience of queer eroticism in exile with the obsolete aesthetics of the Baroque” (215). For Ziarek these are two dangerous tropes that the Romantic mythology of Polish martyrdom cannot contain, made all the more potent by their combination. Drawing on Deleuze, Ziarek shows that the Baroque operates in Gombrowicz’s work as an undoing of a national signifying economy, the tragic and romantic matrix that underlies the “imagined community” of Polish patriotism. But this baroque and carnivalesque laughter in the face of tragedy is also the expression of Gombrowicz’s ambiguous status as an exile, which Ziarek analyses using Kristeva’s work on the foreigner (Kristeva 1991). For both Kristeva and Gombrowicz the situation of the exile simultaneously exarcebrates national identifications and is an aberration from them. According to Ziarek, however, Gombrowicz adds another dimension to Kristeva’s analysis, by insisting that national identifications are based on the opposition between heterosexual and homosexual forms of masculinity, and thus on the “homophobic logic of nationality” (Ziarek 229). Therefore both the subversion of sexual identity and the subversion of literary style through the recourse to the Baroque are inextricably linked as strategies to undermine conventional and patriarchal forms of belonging in favour of an opening towards an unknowable and yet to be determined futurity; an opening that, particularly given current political events, has relevance well beyond the socio-historical context that is dealt with in the novel.</p>
<h2>Lines of Desire or Putting Gombrowicz on the Couch</h2>
<p>Hanjo Berressem’s book, <span class="booktitle">Lines of Desire: Reading Gombrowicz’s Fiction with Lacan</span>, in relation to <span class="booktitle">Gombrowicz’s Grimaces</span>, presents a surprisingly systematic attempt to analyse all of Gombrowicz’s novels according to a Lacanian framework. Each chapter deals with a specific novel and even begins with a section that outlines the plot and structure of each literary narrative, including the specific way each novel corresponds to the Lacanian categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. This is even more surprising given the dizzying array of elements evident in his essay contained in the Ziarek collection, which moves with apparent ease from Hegel and Kant, through Lacan and Deleuze, to concepts derived from contemporary science such as catastrophe theory. However, the essay’s multiplication of references is in fact the flipside of the book’s systems approach and organization, which allows for multiple reference points and conceptual frameworks whether taken from European literature, the history of philosophy or contemporary science.</p>
<p>So, in a sense Berressem’s book, like Ziarek’s collection, attempts to negotiate the dynamics of singularity and multiplicity in Gombrowicz’s work, but comes up with an inverse method; instead of the assemblage of multiple perspectives on Gombrowicz’s work that converge around certain key problematics, Berressem poses a unity, that nevertheless interweaves multiple approaches and conceptual frameworks. Certainly (and inevitably) a different Gombrowicz emerges here, who is no less a poststructuralist avant la lettre, but who is not so much a cultural activist as a systematic creator of a philosophical system. While it is certainly possible to dispute Berressem’s method, the quality and detail of his analyses, as well as his engagement with complex theoretical apparatus including, but not limited to, Lacanian theory, is highly sophisticated and productive. As with <span class="booktitle">Gombrowicz’s Grimaces</span>, this is no mere application of theory to a body of work but a veritable encounter between text and theory in which both are transformed and made to reveal new dimensions. If, in the end Berressem’s project reduces to a psycho-analytic framework, it nevertheless, along with the best essays in Ziarek’s collection, opens up new perspectives not only in relation to Gombrowicz but for literary criticism more generally; along with their other virtues, both these volumes emphatically call for a re-vitalisation of literary criticism and new ways of bringing theory, literary texts, and social practices into productive and dynamic relations. This re-vitalization is very much in keeping with the reading Gombrowicz’s work itself, which the appearance of these two excellent volumes is no doubt already encouraging in the English-speaking world.</p>
<h2>works cited</h2>
<p>Arenas, Reinaldo. <span class="booktitle">Before Night Falls.</span> Trans Delores M. Koch. New York: Viking, 1993.</p>
<p>Butler, Judith. <span class="booktitle">Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity</span>. London: Routledge, 1990.</p>
<p>Deleuze, Gilles. <span class="booktitle">The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque</span>. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.</p>
<p>De Roux, Dominique. <span class="booktitle">Gombrowicz</span>. Paris: Christian Bourgeois Editeur, 1978,1996.</p>
<p>Gombrowicz, Witold. <span class="booktitle">A Kind of Testament</span>. Trans. Alastair Hamilton. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973.</p>
<p>–Bakakai, (Republication of <span class="booktitle">Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity</span>). Trans. Allan Kosko and Georges Sédir. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1998.</p>
<p>– <span class="booktitle">Cours de Philosophie en Six Heures et Quart</span>, Paris: Éditions Payot et Rivages, 1995.</p>
<p>– <span class="booktitle">Diary: Volumes I-III</span>. Trans. Lillian Vallee. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988, 1989, 1993.</p>
<p>– <span class="booktitle">Ferdydurke</span>. Trans. Danuta Borchardt. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.</p>
<p>– <span class="booktitle">Trans-Atlantyk</span>. Trans. Carolyn French and Nina Karsov. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.</p>
<p>Kristeva, Julia. <span class="booktitle">Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection</span>. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.</p>
<p>– <span class="booktitle">Strangers to Ourselves</span>. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.</p>
<p>Nietzsche, Friedrich. <span class="booktitle">Ecce Homo, The Portable Nietzsche</span>. Ed and trans. Walter Kaufmann. London: Penguin, 1968.</p>
<p>Salgas, Jean-Pierre. <span class="booktitle">Gombrowicz ou L’Athéisme Genéralisé</span>, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/hanjo-berressem">Hanjo Berressem</a>, <a href="/tags/gombrowicz">Gombrowicz</a>, <a href="/tags/witold-gombrowicz">Witold Gombrowicz</a>, <a href="/tags/kristeva">Kristeva</a>, <a href="/tags/nietzsche">nietzsche</a>, <a href="/tags/salgas">salgas</a>, <a href="/tags/arenas">arenas</a>, <a href="/tags/butler">butler</a>, <a href="/tags/deleuze">deleuze</a>, <a href="/tags/de-roux">de roux</a>, <a href="/tags/poland">Poland</a>, <a href="/tags/dorota-glowacka">Dorota Glowacka</a>, <a href="/tags/bruno-schulz">bruno schulz</a>, <a href="/tags/argentina">argentina</a>, <a href="/tags/grzegorczyk">Grzegorczyk</a>, <a href="/tags/adam-mickiewicz">Adam Mickiewicz</a>, <a href="/tags/parlej">Parlej</a>, <a href="/tags/zbigniew-herbert">Zbigniew Herbert</a>, <a href="/tags/foucault">foucault</a>, <a href="/tags/queer">queer</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator751 at http://electronicbookreview.comA Poetry of Noesishttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/intimate
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Tim Keane</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-08-25</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Just like our lives, Joseph McElroy’s novels reward those who accept narrative that is honest and courageous enough to engage in as many of the manifold qualities of existence as one necessarily endures. This acceptance - or commitment - is to experience one’s self as <span class="lightEmphasis">energy</span>.</p>
<p>Against prevailing habits of glib simplicities, arid aestheticism, and spiritual pessimism, McElroy’s writing continues to restore, to the American self and to American fiction, those complex energies of overwhelming potential, much the way Nietzsche celebrates his own theories of art as tapping “the mysterious foundation of our being, whose phenomena we are” (<span class="booktitle">Birth of Tragedy</span>).</p>
<p>For over four decades, McElroy’s innumerable characters, his voracious novels, and his grammatical and linguistic explorations, not to mention his willful readers, have adhered to the letter of Rilke’s famous dictum that we should live out the <span class="lightEmphasis">questions</span>. His novels are not full of events any more orderly than actuality. Nor are they <span class="lightEmphasis">contained</span> by time. Rather, in book after book, his writings are dramatic investigations of <span class="lightEmphasis">noesis</span> - that abstract but evocative concept rooted in Platonic idealism and redefined by philosophers (through Phenomenology) as those ineluctable acts of consciousness that constitute reality.</p>
<p>If reality is made up by acts of consciousness (consciousness which, in turn, informs will), then stories (and the language and narrators of stories and even the form of the novel itself) should dramatize how reality comes to be what is made of it by the minds and bodies within it.</p>
<p>A writer’s obsessive concern with perception and cognition as matter for fiction is not new. It dates back to the <span class="booktitle">Book of Job</span> and <span class="booktitle">Don Quixote</span>. But when the constructing consciousness supplants the more familiar physicality of the world as the abiding energy of stories, the results lead to forms of literature and experiences of reading that dramatically disrupt one’s dreary illusions about identity and time and thrillingly transform one’s sense of reality back into that something which it is at all times: quandary, transformation, and self-invention. We see <span class="lightEmphasis">noesis</span> as central to fictions such as Poe’s story, “The Man of the Crowd,” in Kafka’s <span class="booktitle">The Castle</span>, in Melville’s astonishing “Bartleby the Scrivener,” in Henry James’ “In the Cage” and Faulkner’s <span class="booktitle">Pylon</span>, and in postwar literature, through the French <span class="lightEmphasis">nouveau roman</span> as represented by Nathalie Sarraute’s <span class="booktitle">Tropisms</span>, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s <span class="booktitle">The Voyeur</span>, and Claude Simon’s <span class="booktitle">The Grass</span>.</p>
<p>A writer necessarily concerned with the mental acuities and cognitive refinements that constitute the life-work of his characters and their worlds is essentially a poet of emotional intensity and tangible intimacies. For all the comparisons made between Joseph McElroy and half a dozen other brainy American novelists of the Information Age, not one of them comes close to achieving so consistently the emotional truthfulness and the zealous humanism of McElroy’s work. <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/accretive">[see, for example, Paul Gleason’s on the contrasts between McElroy and Don Delillo. - eds.]</a></p>
<p>It all started in <span class="booktitle">A Smuggler’s Bible</span>, where David’s creations of his self through projections into others come up against the re-creations of David by those other selves, forcing David (and the hyper-narrators of that novel) to appreciate (as the reader must) how one can best understand the “shadow of [one’s] own designs” by reading one’s inchoate surroundings ever more carefully. The paradoxical strength of <span class="booktitle">A Smuggler’s Bible</span> is in how well it dramatizes David’s emerging fluency at articulating his existence and in understanding his motives and destinies even as he fields endlessly contradictory and oblique messages from those close to him - his fellow passengers on the ship, fictionalized memories of fellow residents of the Kodak Hotel, his evolving relationship to his new bride, his mother’s overbearing letters and telegrams, his dying father’s oblique communiqués, and the competing yet inter-related interactions with like-minded intellectuals and assorted strangers and fellow collectors waiting back in Brooklyn Heights. The people in David’s circuits reveal more of their truths precisely because of David’s creative attention to them. He learns how such creative construction (or <span class="lightEmphasis">noeisis</span>) carries with it certain consequences beyond one’s individual consciousness, so that “to be too good a listener is to encourage that kind of contact” (407).</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">That kind of contact</span>.</p>
<p>Like the contact in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, as the orbiting human brain communes (“do you read me?”) with engineers on earth (“acrid voice”) and thus undergoes a neurologically-based growth that manifests itself in a simultaneous re-birth of language and a human body, in “wendings, falderals, shearows, morphogens…new words for what he had become” (142).</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Plus</span> dramatizes <span class="lightEmphasis">noesis</span> in its purest and most compressed form.</p>
<p>But the beautiful contradictions and bewildering conclusions of the constructing consciousness also electrify the prose of McElroy’s three massive novels that precede <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> - <span class="booktitle">Hind’s Kidnap</span>, <span class="booktitle">Ancient History: A Paraphase</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Lookout Cartridge</span> - three thrillers in which male heroes attempt to solve, respectively, a kidnapping, a suicide, and a theft, only to find their quests conflated with information systems and personal histories they bear within their consciousnesses (as we all do). Whether those frames of reference are cryptic genealogies or analog computer programs, lost love affairs or missing and neglected children, the drama in those books flowers forth in how the characters negotiate these multiple fields of knowledge and feeling (all at once) in order to solve the particular mystery which set them in motion in the first place.</p>
<p>Even in the <span class="lightEmphasis">bildungsroman</span>, <span class="booktitle">The Letter Left to Me</span>, the main character reads from (or <span class="lightEmphasis">into</span>) the unending interpretations of his dead father’s cliché-ridden letter, those “facts which might be just my comfort in the page - an appetite making mysteries…or exotic endlessness” (88). What the boy reads in the disparate interpretations and reactions to the letter are clues and insights he uses to outwit or to manage the agendas of those adults around him (including his dead father) who exert repressive, often physical control over this boy’s “privileged” existence.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Reading the world</span> is necessary to living your way into it. It is also essential to any serious writing.</p>
<p>Rather than taking place in some fiction called “time,” the stories of our lives unfold within spaces of dramatic intensity so momentary that we need a fiction in which every sentence contains within it the awareness and the conflicts and the doubts of both a moment and an entire life.</p>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> Daley realizes that, for his lover Becca, sexual abuse is not a static condition that will “heal” or that happened once upon a time. Rather abuse is mysterious in its causes and elusive in its effects, especially when one tries to translate such experience into language: like much of what happens to us, abuse is an echoing experience that is always and at every moment being processed by the self which (still) experiences it. The dynamics involved in such a processing of experience are essentially what draws people to people, as Daley is drawn to the abused actress who, through her play/fictions on the stage and in Daley’s house, re-presents those acts of consciousness within her family that shaped for better or worse the young woman she is. Daley reads her carefully, as he witnesses her</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">story</span>, the truth there, the mother’s gold comb lost with grease and hairs stuck in it, curled on the child’s bed, Mom manipulating the family story not telling you who it was left the note for Dad under the front door till the point where we learn how angry he got when our little girl spilled marshmallow on her shoe and then the mother brings up the note; yet the suspense is when, when will she gather her little girl into her arms, the sweet smell on her breath, the sweat of her loins. A little girl who was found. (189)</p>
<p>Within this single sentence, Becca’s mother and father, the girl Becca was and the woman she has become, as well as Daley’s own mind and his own desire, compete in converging acts of cognition that affect every subsequent sentence (and act and consequence) in the novel. And, as the book’s open ending suggests, far beyond the frame of the novel.</p>
<p>With its contemporary energy, its focus on <span class="lightEmphasis">noesis</span> inherent in personal intimacy and its obsession with how contemporary lives in Manhattan reveal histories across the continent, <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> could easily have worked its way into the countless “stories” that make up the overall “building” of McElroy’s most ambitious project, <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>.</p>
<p>Like the thousands of New York City tenements whose purpose is to house ever-changing residents, <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> is a structure of stories in the architectural and literary senses of the word, containing within one overall space those many spaces (stories, dramas) which depict how New York City came to understand itself through social, economic, technological, and political upheavals of the mid-1970s.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> can be read as one book (one building) of collected stories and can also be read as an intimate epic poem about two particular characters coming to grips with femininity and masculinity in the midst of a cast of thousands. This vital intimacy of <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> has been lost in the hyperbolic appraisals of McElroy’s handling of scientific knowledge and cross-disciplinary information systems. Critical readings of Joseph McElroy’s work, so often compared to, say, that of Thomas Pynchon, tend to overlook how much McElroy has in common with Grace Paley, herself a rigorous, avant-garde practitioner of complex fractured fictions. Paley, like McElroy, is a savvy surrealist of New York’s mental neighborhoods and a proponent of how, as she says, “history happens to you while you’re doing the dishes.”</p>
<p>Sixteen of the “stories” that make up <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> appeared independently in literary magazines over the course of ten years (during the 1970s heyday of the American short story), culminating in the 1981 limited edition novella <span class="booktitle">Ship Rock</span> and in several stories in <span class="journaltitle">The New Yorker</span>, one of which earned McElroy both O. Henry and Best American Short Story prizes. And it’s in these stories that perhaps one can most accessibly appreciate the cognitive accomplishments of McElroy’s complicated novel.</p>
<p>Journalist Jim Mayn pursues information regarding stories on environmental policy and pollution in the Southwest, meteorological phenomena, Chilean political exiles, the George Foley Economic Plan, and the roots of those Navajo (and Ojibway and Anansazi) myths that inform his childhood and now increasingly inform his spirituality here at his mid-life. And as Mayn pursues these stories around America, he is also coming to terms with the stories of his own New York neighbors and the closer-to-home stories about the important women in his past, for example when Mayn realizes how he</p>
<p class="longQuotation">chose to be friends with his grandmother - but friends instead of relations or something else <span class="lightEmphasis">unknown</span> to him - having never told her he <span class="lightEmphasis">wasn’t</span> friends with her. Which maybe he never had not been. It wasn’t her fault his mother had taken herself away; and his grandma had been there all along regardless of any view of his; and he even fell thoughtfully in love with his grandmother again, but was more aware of time now, so in knowing his feeling like a man was O.K. but a little early and tough though it didn’t feel tough, he did all over again feel like a man. (800)</p>
<p>The urbane and hip neighbor whom Mayn never meets, Grace Kimball is busy helping an entire cast of Manhattan women (some of whom intersect with Mayn’s acquaintances) come to terms with the untapped freedoms of their gender. That <span class="lightEmphasis">noesis</span> which Kimball explores is more forward-looking and light-footed and even more intricate than Mayn’s self-study. But it is no less serious, even in her infinite, wise-cracking epiphanies, such as</p>
<p class="longQuotation">give yourself back your head, a dayful of head coming to a point of nothing but Love/Power cluster: which drew in along her Black-Dude-street-walk an interesting <span class="lightEmphasis">Old</span> Couple, and not married, she was certain, but deep - and they had story - <span class="lightEmphasis">what is your trip</span>? (Grace went), projecting her mind to new people. (105)</p>
<p>Because they live <span class="lightEmphasis">near</span> though not <span class="lightEmphasis">with</span> neighbors, in the same <span class="lightEmphasis">house</span> but not the same <span class="lightEmphasis">homes</span>, and cross paths physically and psychologically, the characters live out the neo-realist magic of <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>: their creating consciousnesses are revealed to the reader and revealed to themselves and to the other characters through a chorus of shifting narrative voices that very personally and directly articulate the novel. Thus the book comes alive with the energies of a city (a novel) by becoming a city itself - a network of impulses, habits, will-powers, accidents and gestures of thought of inhabitants inhabiting one another in ways which they frequently if inaccurately come to know.</p>
<p>Just as, in the opening story of the novel, a woman in the process of recalling the painful birth of her first child over strawberry daiquiris detects in her memory’s creative details a series of unhappy perceptions of her husband’s helpless distance from her brutal pain that day in the delivery room. As her story unfolds on the page as much as in her active mind, the drama spirals upward to a sweet acceptance of her husband’s bond (“She found on his face a pursed-lip fixity sharing her pain, she knew he shared it. It was love”). Her series of recognitions unfolds as the childbirth itself happens, so that the couple’s physical transformation is paralleled by a birth in knowledge of their greater closeness and their acknowledged distance. Thus the story closes with the woman hearing the “poor flippancy” of her husband’s version of the childbirth. Yet, out of respect for her husband’s “version” of the childbirth, “she did not turn to look him angrily in the eye” (7). A story of a birth and, for the couple, uneasy re-birth.</p>
<p>As in birth so in death. Much later in <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>, a character confronts the news of his impending death which has just been phoned in by his doctor. How the mind might register such information is a major technical and dramatic challenge for a novelist, and McElroy’s handling of the titanic shift in this man’s understanding of himself is masterful: “The news has a future so pressing that his first thought was that he didn’t need to do anything. That is what he doesn’t need. He doesn’t need to do anything. But he doesn’t have time in which not to do anything. His thought has a funny side to it, and he weeps” (1054). His thought’s “funny side” is that fresh energy he’s bravely allowing to change and to enrich him even as it threatens the worst form of the unknown: it is “funny” for its awesome strangeness. The man’s ruminations do not lead to the predictable “action” of sharing this information with his loved ones to whom he immediately speaks on the phone. Rather, the story builds its tensions from the more complex cognitive “actions” of how the man is living into unanswerable existential questions such as “Has he ever done nothing?” and “Isn’t the news positive?” The real “news” here, as it is throughout the novel, is how, through our searching questions and unrelenting attentions, we begin to handle life in more interesting ways and thereby find new purposes for being alive. So the man</p>
<p class="longQuotation">dials his second wife and sees that a child of his might answer and today he hangs up. He feels good. He doesn’t need to do anything. He has to do everything… The buzzer is going to go in a minute, and there is someone or something else not unfriendly but interesting here in the apartment. (1055)</p>
<p>Unfolding in slow motion as the man lets in the super’s daughter to repair an electrical socket, the chapter culminates with the man not telling anyone his news, including the super’s daughter. Completely shared knowledge, the man knows, is a fiction. He decides that the news of his looming death is his, but that the news of this new energy loosed within his life is something he can share (and shares) with the super’s daughter. So he confesses to her, “This is a big day for me… I found out I was interested in myself,” to which the girl poignantly advises the man: “Go with it” (1058).</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Go with it</span>. An expression perhaps more common in 2004 than it was thirty-odd years ago when McElroy began inventing his own language for the American mind’s relation to such possibilities of being. This “it,” in <span class="lightEmphasis">Go with it</span>, like McElroy’s endless streams of indirect pronouns, captures the ambiguities of language wherein characters give a name to their creative and problematic engagements with the unknown. The tensions involved in naming are often the heart of the matter, even in McElroy’s non-fiction. Witness McElroy the essayist urging his own writing self onward as he writes about the horrific collapse of the World Trade Center, witnessed eight blocks from his own front door: words as slippery as thoughts, hopefully accurate in how they define even the most grueling actualities: “Testimony, hopefully. Putting it like a thought together, making something of it. Of oneself. A woman struck down and killed by part of the South Tower plane’s wheel” (” <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/parallel">9/11 Emerging</a> “).</p>
<p>Not much of the news or tension or conflict in <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> hinges on death. But the news is always as large as death. In “The Future,” when the Manhattan diner in which a divorced woman and her precocious son have been sharing a meal gets held up at gunpoint, the actual and very pressing violence of the robbery itself (though harrowing) cannot compete with the intensity of feeling and language that transpires between mother and son; by the time her son sets off to bed, the memory of the hold-up dissolves in those domestic harmonies achieved through the honest self-revelations that both characters have exchanged throughout the story; so the chapter ends in a reciprocal moment of self-understanding for mother and son: “He could see the game only at the narrowest angle; he could hardly see the screen. The light gave her back herself naked on the rug and not alone and feeling upon her curved body the lunar radiance of the TV preserving her love” (317).</p>
<p>Such convoluted yet deep interpersonal connections recur throughout <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>. When for example the unnamed father takes his six-year-old daughter Sarah out to Central Park to help her ride a rented bike. While the lucid prose carefully attends to the physical detail (the spokes of the bike wheel, the arcs of the park’s space, the girl’s feet in the pedals, legs pumping like pistons, the weekend vibe of a city), the meticulous narrator renders the father’s cyclical recognitions of his daughter’s young life as a motion wonderfully beyond him, coming as it does in a realization (which Grace Kimball, elsewhere in the novel, has built her life around) that “when she slowed the bike she seemed to be daydreaming, to have forgotten everything except this. It came to him that she could be more free than her mother was” (785). Slowly, through painstaking observation, the father finds his way into a new conceptualization of his paternal duties, letting go of his daughter, at first physically as she rides the bike, and then emotionally, as she succeeds in handling herself, handling the bike and handling the antagonism of the park without his intervention. Her gradual progress the father understands even in moments when his daughter falters and is most needy: “She tried to pedal as she and the bike went down hard… He ran toward her… She was still headed away from him” (785). The connection between the daughter and her father changes slowly from protectiveness to a liberating loosening of that dependency, a grace which is in turn deepened for the father as he appreciates the rare complexity of their love, standing as it does in contrast to the relationship between an abusive mother in the park, terribly at odds with her son who “was not afraid of her so much as of not doing what she said - or of not knowing how to” (787). The chapter’s title “Rent” suggests an economy of personal space and how, in all of our relationships, we are tenants rather than owners of space. The father learns of the analogies between the claims that time and that money and that his daughter have on him, “to be used and not to go unused” (798).</p>
<p>Time, money, space, love: these are the converging and interdependent themes which drive the characters in <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> to learn about and from one another. The jealous boyfriend in “The Departed Tenant,” in the aftermath of a failed marriage, finally commits to his girlfriend and her new apartment yet also finds himself creepily jealous about a former male tenant of that apartment who flirtatiously continues to phone her. In turn, the girlfriend’s own ambiguity about the relationship plays out in how she uses this “departed” tenant’s presence to undercut her boyfriend, biding her time while she quietly decides whether she feels safe enough to live in the space with her recently divorced lover.</p>
<p>These breakneck oscillations from presence to absence and back again come alive in every sentence and in every consciousness. It is McElroy’s grammatical music of intimacy and distance.</p>
<p>In “The Message for What it Was Worth,” a man commutes far north of the city to his therapist’s office, picking up along the way random signs and sharing odd encounters which in the morning vitality and busy community of Grand Central Station restore his optimism until, arriving at his destination, he discovers that his therapist had phoned to cancel the appointment on account of his own wife’s sudden death. The tension builds as the patient enters the doctor’s house just as the bereaved doctor’s family is arriving. Angry that he missed the cancellation message, the main character nevertheless projects himself, empathetically imagining what his doctor and the doctor`s family are experiencing. In so doing he earns insights into the pain and longing of others that he takes back to the city, where he and his wife speak convincingly about people-as-angels.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The three young people were being given what I had envisioned as my time, and they didn’t want it, I mean they didn’t want mine. Their father was feeling no pain. They had been talking about who I could possibly be, before their father had hauled himself up to go confirm his suspicion. But before that they had been talking of a whole life. (687)</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Talking a life</span> is one way of re-living or re-constructing it.</p>
<p>In “Gordon’s Story: The Year He Skipped,” Jim Mayn arrives back in New York City and invites his neighbor into his apartment for a bourbon. During the extended encounter Mayn comes to learn, in vivid lyrical detail, how Gordon, currently depressed and on leave from his law firm, is still grappling with the emotional fallout from his Brooklyn childhood. Gordon`s unfinished story is abruptly ended when Gordon’s wife Norma makes her way into Mayn’s apartment to water his plants - the woman had assumed that Mayn was still away. Norma’s unexpected presence in the space that Mayn had made for her husband brings to a wistful end the intimacy that had been established between these two successful but wounded middle-aged men. The men are brought closer not by coincidental shared acquaintances like Norma but by the self-awareness and daydreams and fictions of memory which they had elicited from each other and which they had helped build and give form and shape.</p>
<p>The women of <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> tend to be drawn closer by shared antagonisms and the excitement of their own liberated spaces, as in the two women of “Still Life: Sisters Sharing Information” who deconstruct one woman’s first marriage to a “second-generation pig” named Dave. While chatting feverishly in a pastry shop these women find out, with the helpful intervention of an eavesdropping male customer, that the subjects of their talk have turned out to be the same Dave.</p>
<p>The narrator and main character in “Daughter of the Revolution” grapples with her sexual identity alone and mostly on her own terms, teaching herself how her obsessive affections for a mysterious “Maureen” lead her to question among other things the “power” of their feminist workshop “leader,” Grace Kimball. The narrator’s thoughts unlock mysteries of physical passion between women as well as intimations of maternal love lost and found. These self-revelations in turn transform her own connection to the “movement” when she discovers that,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">What I never knew well enough, even in the honesty of our arms freely finding each other, was that her [Maureen’s] need was not for what she [Maureen’s mother] said: and my desire, if it had passed into her life easily and received, would have given her what she hadn’t known she wanted…some slight curve of a long turning from that life she had found away from the mother who ruled without ruling and, I gathered but only from Grace’s hearsay, did not much love Maureen but did not let her know. (925)</p>
<p>The story makes wildly clear that these labyrinthine insights are not abstract musings but symptoms or consequences of the woman’s passionate gay love for Maureen coming into itself. The confusing maternal bonds of both the “leader” Grace Kimball and Maureen’s absent mother are in and of themselves not simply thoughts but experiences of knowledge-as-love, and the episode closes with the narrator acknowledging just such an intimacy, a “closeness beyond closeness” which liberates her as she learns “how she didn’t see Maureen as a victim any more” (926).</p>
<p>Because <span class="lightEmphasis">noesis</span> is an almost instinctual process of the invigorated creating consciousness and necessarily central to the self’s making of its reality and the world’s actuality, such force necessarily brings with it emotional change and turning-points in reason and perception, often within a single written clause, as in, “I mean I don’t mean how to put a new clutch in a beat-up city bus” (701), or, “And before the host could think to answer the guest’s casual suspicion, he was adding what, as he said, the guest knew little if anything about…”(559), and “they liked each other’s embodiements but not each other, which was suddenly now clear to each as he looked to his left only to find her as she pulled back the operating half of the old steel double-door and stepped forth into the bright gray day” (1077). For McElroy, the convention of a manageable syntax (for acceptable syntax is both a convention and an artifice) yields to halting rhythms and sudden breaks in thought because these fluctuations capture the transforming energies of our living moments and our receptivity to those moments. If we deny the contortions and digressions of our inner life in “waking life” or by lulling our selves by reading soothing settled fiction, then McElroy’s writing is exceptional for how it shows these internal syntactic im-pulses sooner or later playing out in the external reality which we are perpetually shaping for ourselves and for others. This truth is the optimism that informs and colors his entire oeuvre.</p>
<p>That vast intelligence that critics endlessly point out in McElroy’s work is always and at every point connected to realizations and to mysteries and to evolutions in the lives of flesh-and-blood characters - characters in the boldest sense of the word: engaging energies at large in the multi-layered conflicts and thought systems of late twenty-first century life. His shifting, elliptical, and baroque prose constructions are not matters of style so much as means of being true to a mind’s fullness and the world’s mess.</p>
<p>The late Harold Brodkey is perhaps the only male writer of McElroy’s generation to have rivaled his combination of realistic psychological sensitivity and an avant-garde technical sensibility. In a typically catty but still prescient 1977 essay called “Some Notes on Chekhov,” Brodkey regrets how the most talented of contemporary American prose innovators have failed to bring into their fiction the fullest possible range of human emotional experience. He argues that the American heirs to Chekhov and Proust have settled for technical perfection at the expense of the human complexity that informed the fictions of those two master psychologists.</p>
<p>Today, of course, the obverse charge might be laid against the predictable sentimentality and play-it-safe mentality of most mainstream American fiction. It’s a healthy artistic debate that will continue - this question of engagement and risk. It should start with a reminder of how well McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> has made the issue moot.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Brodkey, Harold. “Some Notes on Chekhov.” <span class="booktitle">Sea Battles on Dry Land: Essays</span>. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.</p>
<p>Nietzsche, Friedrich. <span class="booktitle">The Birth of Tragedy</span>. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. New York: Penguin Books, 1993</p>
<p>Paley, Grace. “Two Ears, Three Lucks.” In <span class="booktitle">The Collected Stories</span>. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/tim-keane">tim keane</a>, <a href="/tags/keane">keane</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-mcelroy">Joseph McElroy</a>, <a href="/tags/mcelroy">mcelroy</a>, <a href="/tags/noesis">noesis</a>, <a href="/tags/nietzsche">nietzsche</a>, <a href="/tags/rilke">rilke</a>, <a href="/tags/plato">Plato</a>, <a href="/tags/cognitive">cognitive</a>, <a href="/tags/consciousness">consciousness</a>, <a href="/tags/energy">energy</a>, <a href="/tags/reality">reality</a>, <a href="/tags/phenomenology">Phenomenology</a>, <a href="/tags/new-york-city">new york city</a>, <a href="/tags/911">9/11</a>, <a href="/tags/nyc">nyc</a>, <a href="/tags/brooklyn">brooklyn</a>, <a href="/tags/bildungsroman">bildungsroman</a>, <a href="/tags/information">information</a>, <a href="/tags/system">system</a>, <a href="/tags/thomas-pynchon">thomas pynchon</a>, <a href="/tags/grace-paley">Grace Paley</a>, <a href="/tags/avant-garde-0">avant-garde</a>, <a href="/tags/contemp">contemp</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1089 at http://electronicbookreview.comBataille&#8217;s Project: Atheology, Non-Knowledgehttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/prayerful
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Marc LaFountain</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-11-12</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall have produced an extremely important volume that belongs in the libraries of all who are interested in Georges Bataille. The Kendalls’ collection of Bataille’s essays, notes, poems, letters, lectures, paratextual comments, and aphorisms presents many works not before assembled. These works are fragments of a volume that Bataille envisioned, and repeatedly rethought and rearranged, from the early 1950s onward, but the volume remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1962.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge</span> contains some previously translated essays and writings, but it also contains new translations, commentary, and working materials that Bataille did not ready or intend for publication. The title of the Kendalls’ text parallels <span class="booktitle">Le Systeme inacheve du non-savoir</span>, Bataille’s projected title for the fifth volume of <span class="booktitle">La Somme atheologique</span>. The first three volumes of <span class="booktitle">La Somme atheologique (Inner Experience, Guilty, and On Nietzsche)</span> were published, whereas the fourth, <span class="booktitle">Le Pur Bonheur</span>, was completed but hasn’t been widely circulated, and the fifth was never completed. Both the fourth and fifth volumes were even omitted from one of Bataille’s projections of <span class="booktitle">La Somme</span> just prior to his death. <span class="booktitle">The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge</span> contains <span class="booktitle">Method of Meditation</span> and “Post-Scriptum 1953,” which Bataille added to the second edition of <span class="booktitle">Inner Experience</span> (the Kendalls note these were missing from Boldt’s well-received 1988 translation of <span class="booktitle">Inner Experience</span>). It also contains the projected fourth volume, <span class="booktitle">Le Pur Bonheur</span> (“Pure Happiness”), as well as Bataille’s notebook for “Pure Happiness.”</p>
<p>The Kendalls’ introduction is interesting and informative. It contains chronological and background information that is often discussed in other works on Bataille and his writings. It focuses in particular though on the time of the late 1940s until his death. They direct this focus, however, not at his war and post-war politics, but rather at his interest in what amounts to a “codification” or “handbook” of sorts, by Bataille himself, of what is meant by and necessary for “sovereign operations.” One senses here the aging Bataille’s interest in clarifying his work on effusion and “the extreme of the possible” as a “method of meditation” (94). Unlike Breton’s papal relation to the Surrealist canon, however, Bataille sought only to emphasize the methodical practices and various principles or postulates derived from his explorations. The Kendalls highlight the many plans Bataille had for various books and writing projects, most of which he refigured incessantly and eventually abandoned. In particular, the Kendalls give significant attention to the many imagined versions of <span class="booktitle">La Somme</span> Bataille generated. The introduction provides clear definitions of Bataille’s “atheology,” especially within the context of the works this unique volume assembles. While admittedly their introduction is a series of fragments covering many aspects of Bataille’s thought, the Kendalls celebrate Bataille’s unfinished <span class="booktitle">La Somme</span> by focusing in particular on “the demise of discursive thought” (xxxviii), as found, for instance, in Bataille’s “Aphorisms for the `System`” and “Notebook for Pure Happiness.” Particularly interesting and important are the endnotes that accompany Bataille’s writings. For instance, in “Post-Scriptum 1953,” which accompanied the 1954 edition of <span class="booktitle">Inner Experience</span>, Bataille notes, “In my eyes, Method of Meditation was situated as an extension of Inner Experience” (291).</p>
<p>The first of Bataille’s writings that the Kendalls present is his proposal for a “College of Socratic Studies.” This essay highlights “slipping,” one of Bataille’s favorite and, I think, too frequently overlooked notions. This piece also emphasizes a number of familiar and important terms Bataille worked with over time: inner experience, expenditure, slippage, contestation, impossible, chance, the sacred, a beyond, irony, nonknowledge, isolation, communication, anguish, and method. Perhaps the Kendalls begin here because of their emphasis, developed in their introduction, that Bataille cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the degree to which he was a systematic thinker. Bataille engages and enters “the system,” but unlike Rael in Peter Gabriel’s <span class="booktitle">The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway</span>, who finds that “you gotta in to get out,” there is no “out.” Indeed one must go in, and that necessitates method. Only method opens the possibility of the impossible. But there is no getting out. Thus, unlike Surrealism or religion or philosophical systems with an “end” (e.g., structuralism, or phenomenology writ large by Hegel or small by Husserl and the French existential phenomenologists, who formed the intellectual matrix Bataille swam in), there is nothing to return to. There is an end, temporary, to isolation, which is where communication happens, but there is no out. A beyond, but no out. A beyond that is immense and proximate, and impossible. Hence contestation, and surprisingly, prayer.</p>
<p>In this piece Bataille defends, for a moment, the value of scholasticism. His focus is not on Scholasticism as set of particular ideas per se, but scholasticism as outline and method - a practice of proceeding methodically to develop language, thought, and discursive principles only to expend them as they reach a limit they cannot express. It is in this methodical practice is where the slippage toward real communication happens. Bataille chooses Socrates not to defend his scholasticism (“Aren’t those who fight for the dead already dead themselves?”), but because of the irony that proceeds from Socrates’ twin principles: “know yourself” and “I know but one thing, that I know nothing.” Like Socrates, or Buddha, or the Christian, Bataille developed a method that was demandingly principled and systematic, but it lead nowhere. Only in this nowhere would humans for once truly end their isolation. This nowhere, experience itself, has value beyond language. Bataille is careful to differentiate his method and its “end” from that of the Buddhist, who denies the world and pain, and the Christian, who finds God as an exterior authority in which the “incessant interrogation of existence by itself” indeed ends. For Bataille though “the end” is impossible, and that is the happy anguish that awaits those who participate in his “Socratic College.”</p>
<p>The Kendalls follow the essay on the Socratic College with Bataille’s discussion of Nietzsche’s laughter. Laughter is not just about dissipation, it is also about inner experience as the leap into the abyss. It is about Bataille’s concerns with divinity and God, who haunts his thought as did Hegel, and his efforts toward an understanding of sin and “hyper-Christianity.” Following this essay is the important “Discussion on Sin.” As Bataille continued to envision his atheological system, he reiterated his struggles with philosophy and God. Over and over and over again he reiterated that “method,” “practice,” “postulate,” and “principle” are spaces of slippage, eternally returning moments when “I pull the rug out from under myself. And so what: I’m free, powerless, and I will perish: I ignore the limits of obligation <span class="lightEmphasis">in every way</span> ” (108, emphasis Bataille). We see that ignoring the limits requires methodical and careful engagement with those very limits.</p>
<p>Bataille’s “Discussion on Sin” considers inner experience and sovereign moments in relation to Nietzsche’s notions of the “summit” and “decline” moralities and his efforts to articulate his critique of Christianity and defend his ideas against various critics. The “Discussion on Sin” is significant for Bataille’s development of his ideas on communication and his rejection of individualism. Too frequently Bataille’s work is confused with a form of subjectivism; this piece shows his thinking on that matter. The significance of this piece also lies in its being representative of a number of group discussions that Bataille, much like the Surrealists, pursued on a regular basis. Participating in the discussion on sin were the usual suspects associated with Bataille - Klossowski, Blanchot, Leiris, Paulhan. Also there were Sartre, Camus, de Beauvior, Merleau-Ponty and Hippolyte. A third group was comprised of priests such as Father Danielou and Father More, who hosted many such meetings at his home, and Gabriel Marcel. The “Discussion” not only presents “propositions” from Bataille’s lecture, but also a response from Father Danielou, as well as the discussion, with lengthy exchanges between Bataille and Sartre, Hippolyte, and Marcel.</p>
<p>Bataille sought a revolution in consciousness (hence, among others, his ongoing affinity to Surrealism despite his differences with its canon). Sovereign experience is not subjective experience. In fact, it is grounded in a “communication” that ends the isolation of subjective beings, even though that communication is impossible. Perhaps this rejection of subjectivism necessitated Bataille’s obsession with producing propositions and a method of meditation. These were absolutely necessary for the contestation of the self and of existence by itself. Without this contestation and the end of the possible, sovereign moments would be entangled in decline moralities that themselves were tangled in projects. Here Rimbaud is perhaps more illuminating than Jesus or Buddha or various yogis and mystics. Unlike Breton and the Surrealists, however, Bataille did not ride the Hegelian dialectic. Or if dialectics are to be thought, they must be transvalued as an “advanced dialectic,” which Bataille recommended in <span class="booktitle">Death and Sensuality</span>. Such a dialectic doubles as transgression, and it leads to “continuity.” Transcendence and nothing occur at the end of a ruptured (dialectical) movement that eternally returns. Klossowski and Blanchot’s versions of the eternal return are closer to what Bataille might have accepted as a “dialectic.” The beyond at the end of this “dialectic” is more akin to the <span class="foreignWord">differance</span> that drew Derrida and the alterity that inspired Levinas. Nor is contestation random or to be left to objective chance. Rejecting objective chance, Bataille is closer to Dali than to Breton in his insistence on the active intervention of subjectivity in producing the delirium and effusion that would instigate its own undoing. Contestation is eternal and leads nowhere. To arrive at this nowhere is the projectless project of Bataille.</p>
<p>The above discussion of the significance of propositions and method should not lead the reader to assume that <span class="booktitle">The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge</span> strays from Bataille’s interest in expenditure of self and discourse. For instance, in “Outside The Tears of Eros,” the very last piece included in <span class="booktitle">The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge</span>, which was also Bataille’s working notes from 1959-61 for a new book he was preparing while he was completing <span class="booktitle">The Tears of Eros</span>, one finds Bataille describing himself as “the hurtling train, the catastrophe…flash of lightning in the night…groping in obscurity…” (259-60). To the very end of his physical existence he struggled with the end, the impossible, with God, with Hegel’s system, and with language. In <span class="booktitle">Method of Meditation</span>, Bataille had noted that poetry is “the closest effusion to meditation” (95). The very last words of “Outside <span class="booktitle">The Tears of Eros</span>,” which are the very last words of the volume itself, are “ready to pray” (273).</p>
<p>The Kendalls note in their introduction that this readiness to pray accompanies Bataille’s acceptance of the failure of atheology. What a (bitter)sweet failure. At the limit of the possible, the effusion of poetry inevitably necessitates method and practice, this time as prayer. Prayer? Bataille? Not what one might have imagined. Then again, prayer is language and discourse, a space which must be contested. Prayer is another method by which to seek what his friend Blanchot sought: disaster and affliction, and fascination and radiant immensity. Prayer is a practice by which to experience the immobilizing and passionate encounter that Blanchot describes in <span class="booktitle">The Space of Literature</span> as distant, yet absolutely near. This distant proximity disturbs and animates life. Prayer then for Bataille is a practice of the kind of “acrobatics” and “ridiculousness” he called for in <span class="booktitle">Madame Edwarda</span> and <span class="booktitle">Inner Experience</span>, which assert the “fundamental right of man to signify nothing.” Then again, maybe Bataille, at the abyss very near the end of his life, unlike Nietzsche, was ready for expiation or supplication, or a project? To think this would be counter to the project framed by what we know or want to know about Bataille. But just what <span class="lightEmphasis">do</span> we know?</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/marc-lafountain">marc lafountain</a>, <a href="/tags/bataille">bataille</a>, <a href="/tags/nietzsche">nietzsche</a>, <a href="/tags/unfinished-system-nonknowledge">Unfinished System of Nonknowledge</a>, <a href="/tags/blanchot">blanchot</a>, <a href="/tags/dali">dali</a>, <a href="/tags/derrida">derrida</a>, <a href="/tags/hegel">hegel</a>, <a href="/tags/breton">breton</a>, <a href="/tags/rimbaud">rimbaud</a>, <a href="/tags/surreal">surreal</a>, <a href="/tags/levinas">levinas</a>, <a href="/tags/klossowski">Klossowski</a>, <a href="/tags/leiris">leiris</a>, <a href="/tags/paulhan">Paulhan</a>, <a href="/tags/sartre">sartre</a>, <a href="/tags/camus">camus</a>, <a href="/tags/de-beauvior">de Beauvior</a>, <a href="/tags/merleau-ponty">Merleau-Ponty</a>, <a href="/tags/hippolyte">Hippolyte</a>, <a href="/tags/father-danielou">Father Danielou</a>, <a href="/tags/father-more">Father More</a>, <a href="/tags/g">G</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator899 at http://electronicbookreview.comNarratological Amphibiousness, or: Invitation to the Covert History of Possibilityhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/betweenness
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Lance Olsen</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-04-24</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="emphasis">confessions of a future junkie</span></p>
<p>The present, it almost (but not quite) goes without saying, is too present to imagine.</p>
<p>It’s too much with us.</p>
<p>It’s the Technicolor gel we live in.</p>
<p>Try to get your mind around it, try to get some distance on it, some language with which to articulate it, and in the end all you frequently feel is dumb.</p>
<p>All you feel in the end is like you just raised your camera to take a shot of that skyscraper in front of you, no, that pallid-skinned red-haired girl crossing the street beside you, no, that jet rushing above you, yes, and your viewfinder frames nothing but blank blue sky or cloud cusp or, if you’re really, really lucky, some ghost-strand contrails at 39,000 feet.</p>
<p>It is nonsense trying to pin down the present, an act of egg-headed presumption, a fool’s game doomed to fail over and over again, and the one I just can’t stop playing.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">thinking as digestion</span></p>
<p>In part, it seems to me, that’s because every writer contributes in some small way to the present’s invention.</p>
<p>Whether or not she or he likes it, of course.</p>
<p>Whether or not he or she is even necessarily aware of it.</p>
<p>And in part that’s because, by trying to imagine the present, writers have a hand in imagining the future, and, by having a hand in imagining the future, writers have a hand, a tiny hand, granted, a tiny hand but a real hand, a real hand and therefore an important hand, in shaping its architectonics.</p>
<p>And in part that’s because trying to imagine the present and therefore the future is a means for our species of remaining awake, a way of rousing ourselves in the midst of our dreaming.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Thinking</span>, Ludwig Wittgenstein once reminded us, is <span class="lightEmphasis">digestion</span>; thinking, in other words, is that much a component of who we are.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">If you don’t use your own imagination</span>, Ronald Sukenick once reminded us, <span class="lightEmphasis">somebody else is going to use it for you</span>.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">cloning as pleasure principle</span></p>
<p>For me, here, now, for all of us, here, now, there exists a plethora of presents, a number of imaginings, many of which are flat and faded as last month’s best-seller list, last week’s <span class="journaltitle">New Yorker</span>, the scant three or seven watery appraisals of fiction in yesterday’s <span class="journaltitle">New York Times Book Review</span>: instance after instance of the bland leading the bland.</p>
<p>Many of these imaginings are written by the same author.</p>
<p>(This is a secret many people don’t know.)</p>
<p>Many of these imaginings are written by the same author and published by the same publishing company and many carry some formulation of the same message:</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Everything will work out in the redemptive end,</span> they say. <span class="lightEmphasis">Every story is the same story because every person is the same person. There is nothing new under the Ecclesiastes. Tomorrow will be better than today. Don’t worry; be happy. Be sad for a little while, obviously, but then be happy. Characters are plump people. Plot is pleasant arc. Language is plain transparence. The body is boring, politics passé, gender stable, realism real, the page a predictable arrangement of paragraphs descending. Go to sleep.</span></p>
<p><span class="emphasis">narratological amphibiousness</span></p>
<p>But the imaginings that have interested me most, the ones that have kept me awake the longest, are the relatively covert ones, culturally speaking: those that acknowledge our continual condition of textual, ontological, and epistemological inbetweenness while searching for adventurous forms that can express said condition with what André Breton once called <span class="lightEmphasis">convulsive beauty</span>, thereby capturing the sense of disquieting surprise many of us feel inhabiting these first few seconds of this fresh millennium, this new network of potential presents and potential futures.</p>
<p>These are the imaginings that engage with what I have come to think of lately as <span class="lightEmphasis">Narratological Amphibiousness</span>.</p>
<p>How might fiction and hence perception become richer, these narratologically amphibious imaginings ask by their very presence - these are the imaginings, by the way, that continuously refuse to tell - how might fiction and hence perception become richer by living commensally alongside, in, and/or among several structures and genres and modes of being and seeing at once?</p>
<p>At a local scale, they ask what might happen at the intersection(s) of, say, transgressive fiction and speculative fiction, surfiction and detective fiction, avant-pop pla(y)giarism and surrealist game, pornography and fake memoir.</p>
<p>At a more global scale, they ask what might happen at the intersection(s) of fiction and, say, photography, music, video, theory, poetry, computer games, drama, sculpture, hypermedia, painting.</p>
<p>That is, they conceive of fiction, as Roland Barthes once did, as <span class="lightEmphasis">a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. …a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. …a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one…would ever be in his [or her] final place.</span></p>
<p><span class="emphasis">the history of possibility spaces</span></p>
<p>Narratologically amphibious imaginings are, in effect, fictive possibility spaces that encourage us to contemplate and converse about what happens at the horizon of Both/And, at the precise instant boundaries become permeable and commence giving rise to all tomorrow’s parties.</p>
<p>That moment of permeability and opportunity, I should probably emphasize at this juncture, is not an exclusively postmodern one.</p>
<p>Or, if it is an exclusively postmodern one, then we must begin to think of postmodernity less as a discrete historical period than as a diffuse ahistorical state of consciousness whose propensity is for opening up and out rather than closing down and in - a mode of perpetual questioning (of language, of form, of experience) that leads to a position of perpetual floating.</p>
<p>When I speak of Narratological Amphibiousness, I am thinking of the conversation implied among such diverse writings as, for instance, Nietzsche’s <span class="booktitle">Thus Spake Zarathustra</span>, whose project is to fuse and confuse radical skepticism with fictional narration with lyric poetry with visionary rant; and, more recently and radically, Burroughs’ appropriation and manipulation of science-fiction tropes in the <span class="booktitle">Nova Trilogy</span>; and, more recently still, Carole Maso’s stunningly subjective discourse-travel along the edge of poetry and prose, or Laird Hunt’s wonderful 2001 debut, <span class="booktitle">The Impossibly</span>, a warped metaphysical detective narrative which reads as if Donald Barthelme were channeling Alain Robbe-Grillet, Paul Auster, Ben Marcus, and reruns of <span class="filmtitle">Get Smart</span>, where a mysteriously afflicted unnamed narrator unravels lightheartedly, suffering memory lapses, ominous clubbings at the hands of strangers, and a sort of existential aphasia as he drifts through an increasingly shadowy universe.</p>
<p>I am also thinking, as I say, of texts that investigate the aesthetic prospects generated not only at the intersection of different sorts of writing, but also at the intersection of different sorts of writing and the other arts - those narratologically amphibious works that explore what Sukenick terms the <span class="lightEmphasis">technological reality of the page</span>:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">- <span class="lightEmphasis">the graphic novel</span>, such as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s extraordinary <span class="booktitle">Watchmen</span> and Art Spiegelman’s <span class="booktitle">Maus</span> from the eighties, postmodern analogs of the illuminated manuscript which think themselves back through the countercultural comics of the sixties to such surrealist collage-novels of the twenties as Max Ernst’s <span class="booktitle">The Hundred-Headed Woman</span>, while playfully blending sketches with sham and not-so-sham autobiography, police reports, ornithological articles, letters, toy brochures, and advertisements;</p>
<p class="longQuotation">- or <span class="lightEmphasis">word-object fictions</span>, such as Raymond Federman’s impish <span class="booktitle">Double or Nothing</span> (1971) and, more recently, Eckhard Gerdes’ <span class="booktitle">Cistern Tawdry</span> (2003), which explode conventional layout, typography, and other visual aspects of writing while nodding toward such antecedents as Apollinaire’s <span class="booktitle">Calligrammes</span> (1919);</p>
<p class="longQuotation">- or <span class="lightEmphasis">miscellany fictions</span>, such as Kathy Acker’s powerfully transgressive <span class="booktitle">Blood and Guts in High School</span> (1984) or, more recently, Mark Danielewski’s exciting and theoretically provocative <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> (2000), which employ drawings, photographs, and other pictorial elements to enrich and challenge the reading experience;</p>
<p class="longQuotation">(<span class="emphasis">Nota Bene, or A Short Intermission</span>: <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span>, the story of a family who moves into a Borgesian dwelling they soon discover is larger on the inside than the outside [an extended metaphor for the possibility space of text itself], takes more interesting and complex narrative and paginal chances than almost any other novel to appear in the last decade and a half while seldom sacrificing forward momentum. In addition to investigating at length a poetics of indeterminacy, it probes the amorphous zone between written text and film, conventional text and word-object fiction, linear text and hypertext, and, in a remarkably amphibious move, between experimental text and edge music in its cooperation with <span class="booktitle">Haunted</span> (2000), the album composed by Danielwski’s sister, Poe, which doesn’t so much appropriate and retell the novel’s story as rethink its core obsession with the Father.)</p>
<p class="longQuotation">- or <span class="lightEmphasis">nonlinear hypertext fiction</span>, such as Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley’s <span class="booktitle">My Name is Captain, Captain</span> (2002), a hyper-elegy about the anniversary of a woman’s death whose real protagonist turns out to be the text’s own processes (the beautifully designed interplay between elusive language and the motion of ever-morphing surfaces), which frequently includes music, videos, graphics, kinetic language, and myriad interactive components while, as George P. Landow has famously pointed out, <span class="lightEmphasis">abandon[ing] conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replac[ing] them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks</span> - thereby enacting the deconstructive turn in the very mechanics of structure.</p>
<p>The history of these and similar richly deformed textual moments is the history of what Deleuze and Guattari call <span class="lightEmphasis">the rhizomic</span> after the proliferating horizontal, usually underground stem that sends out roots and shoots in every direction. <span class="lightEmphasis">Long live the multiple</span>, they urge.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">the future of possibility spaces</span></p>
<p>Hypertext fiction, of course, like the traditional book, exists as a bridge into other soon-to-arrive or soon-to-fully-arrive narratologically amphibious possibility spaces.</p>
<p>Virtual reality, already the dead letters of cyberpunk films and fiction, will allow us in fewer than ten years to enter a sense-around cartoon-gel room where we’ll be able see and hear, say, Homer, perhaps incarnated as a lobster, recite <span class="booktitle">The Odyssey</span> to us while we watch its events acted by computer-generated thespians who never existed outside an algorithm and read and even modify its text as it scrolls by on some screen, perhaps incarnated as a fish tank, touching textured words or phrases that will send us, if we like, into reams of research or a narrative hotel of further possibility spaces … hearing, if we wish, what ancient musical instruments sounded like, or maybe gliding through examples of Greek architecture, or conceivably linking to other epics, or lectures on epic composition, or into breaches where we might engage with other readers in three-dimensional chat rooms or leave behind our own traces in the form of comments or questions or further retellings.</p>
<p>Then, within the next twenty or thirty years, things will start getting really interesting. That’s when narratological amphibiousness will move from outside our heads to inside by means of biochip technology. Our computers will thus interface with our central nervous systems, and the distinction between textuality and biology will become indistinguishable. In order to dream someone else’s dreams, to think someone else’s thoughts - the essence of what a book has always been about - all you’ll need to do is shut your eyes.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">covert invitation to failure</span></p>
<p>The imaginings that have interested me most, then, the ones that have kept me awake the longest, are the Frankenstein fictions, the termite texts, the cyborg and centaur scripts, the narratologically amphibious writings that embrace a poetics of beautiful monstrosity, because, in part, for me they represent innovative thought - experiments that help us contemplate, not what it means to be a human being, but what it means to be human beings <span class="lightEmphasis">now</span>, what it might mean to be human beings <span class="lightEmphasis">the day after tomorrow</span>, how our consciousnesses and bodies move, and, by contemplating such notions, maybe even having a hand, a tiny hand but a real hand, a real hand and therefore an important hand, in shaping today’s and tomorrow’s architectonics.</p>
<p>For me, therefore, one of the most engaging tasks for the seriously playful writer in this century will be to attempt to think and feel beyond the kinds of texts I have just mentioned here … and fail. Fail and, needless to say, now and then, here and there, fail to fail.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/auster">auster</a>, <a href="/tags/maso">maso</a>, <a href="/tags/buggroughs">buggroughs</a>, <a href="/tags/sukenick">sukenick</a>, <a href="/tags/wittgenstein">wittgenstein</a>, <a href="/tags/breton">breton</a>, <a href="/tags/barthes">barthes</a>, <a href="/tags/nietzsche">nietzsche</a>, <a href="/tags/robe-grillet">robe-grillet</a>, <a href="/tags/ben-marcus">ben marcus</a>, <a href="/tags/us">U.S.</a>, <a href="/tags/laird-hunt">laird hunt</a>, <a href="/tags/house-leaves">House of Leaves</a>, <a href="/tags/danielweski">danielweski</a>, <a href="/tags/maus">maus</a>, <a href="/tags/art-spielgleman">art spielgleman</a>, <a href="/tags/federman">federman</a>, <a href="/tags/acker">acker</a>, <a href="/tags/odyessy">the odyessy</a>, <a href="/tags/frankenstein">frankenstein</a>, <a href="/tags/avant-garde">avant garde</a>, <a href="/tags/avant-garde-0">avant-garde</a>, <a href="/tags/avant-pop">avant-pop</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator854 at http://electronicbookreview.comOf Graphomania, Confession, and the Writing Selfhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/graphomaniac
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Todd Napolitano</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-09-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>[ <span class="lightEmphasis">At the time of its publication in 1996, this essay caused quite a stir in the greater online community, with an essay by <a class="outbound" href="http://www.nobody-knows-anything.com/reply.html">Diane Patterson</a> at the fore. At stake was the association of online journals and “women’s writing.” The links to the journals mentioned are no longer active. For a contemporaneous essay on Web journals, see Greg Dyer’s <a class="internal" href="/writingpostfeminism/illicit">Stealing Glances</a>, or Rob Wittig’s <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/serial">Justin Hall and the Birth of the Blogs</a> for a more recent look at “blogs,” Eds.</span> ]</p>
<p>Anyone venturing to explore a genre as vast as women’s writing on the Web is bound to feel a bit overwhelmed by the innumerable number of people calling themselves “writers.” Milan Kundera’s words readily come to mind here. “According to my calculations,” writes Kundera, “there are two or three fictional characters baptized on earth every second.” For years, I felt Kundera’s estimate to be rather exaggerated, flash-in-the-pan “creative writers” not withstanding. Until recently, that is. For as I think about his project on women’s writing on the net, I can’t help wondering if Kundera’s estimate isn’t somewhat <span class="lightEmphasis">understated</span>.</p>
<p>I don’t want to sound overly pessimistic here. In fact, I very much relish the idea that all net identities are fictional characters of sorts - isn’t this the creative allure of virtual reality, to become-beyond-oneself in an endless “web” of information, identities, and virtual bodies, to experience a radically new <span class="foreignWord">aporia</span> with one’s mundane, this-worldly existence. The ironic juxtaposition of “virtual” reality and the “real” - this was the power of transgression that once attracted me to the Net. A new moment of aesthetic emergence [ <span class="foreignWord">entstehung</span> ], the moment of arising as Nietzsche puts it. Indeed, what is so important here is that Nietzsche <span class="lightEmphasis">always writes to efface himself</span>. The Net, I thought - the ironic play of identities, an electronic masquerade, writing to unwrite oneself.</p>
<p>Ah, I am quite the fool. Having spent hours over the past three or four years reading through just some of the thousands of so-called “writers” publishing themselves electronically, I now completely empathize with Kundera when he claims, “I am always unsure of myself when it comes time for me to enter that vast crowd of John the Baptists.” Unfortunately, Kundera’s Kierkegaardian moments of self-doubt remain the exception rather than the rule. Now, I certainly do not wish to squelch creativity (I am not quite as abject as Adorno in this regard), and I by no means want to dismiss women’s writing <span class="foreignWord">per se</span>. Quite the contrary, I am an advocate. What I am lamenting is how anyone with a computer and access to the Net fancies themselves a writer who simply must be read. Like an assembly of crazed narrators from a Poe anthology, this new generation of hacks simply grab you by the shirt collar and refuse to let go until their story has been told.</p>
<p>Kundera has the perfect term for this sort of writing - Graphomania. As Kundera describes it, graphomania is not “the mania to create a form,” that is, not a mania to create challenging new aesthetic forms and media, but rather a mania “to impose one’s self on others” through already established modes of “received ideas” and pervasive non-thought [ <span class="foreignWord">idées reçues</span> ]. Graphomania reflects a singular neurosis common to modernity: namely, the need to have an audience, “a public audience of unknown readers.” Graphomaniacs aspire to make stories out of their lives and thus presume to do a lot of people good. Writing four love letters a day is not graphomania; xeroxing your love letters so that they may be published one day is. In other words, it is true we cannot do without feelings. But I think Kundera puts it best when he says that “the moment they are considered values in themselves, criteria of truth, justifications for kinds of behavior, they become frightening.”</p>
<p>Frankly, I find many on-line journals frightening, all the more so because graphomania is not just an isolated phenomenon; no, it is a <span class="lightEmphasis">cultural ethos and a morality</span>, and it is not restricted to writing <span class="foreignWord">per se</span>. On the contrary, it pervades the very fabric of our every-day relations with others.</p>
<p></p><center>“That’s just like me, I….”</center>
<p>We may see graphomania as the overpowering conflation of the will to truth, the will to power, and ressentiment.</p>
<p>The on-line personal journal - at its worst, a new outlet for personal refuge we would otherwise find inane, petty, and grotesquely self-indulgent - is a perfect case in point. For here we have graphomania masquerading as the journal, that progressive, alternative women’s medium which has fortuitously found voice in academe. Certainly, journals are an empowering medium in the history of women’s writing, given the patriarchal politics underpinning the aesthetic realm. As such, their artistic and political import cannot and should not be overlooked. But too many on-line journals, while purporting to have a place within the larger tradition of women’s journal writing, are in actuality merely the same old blather recycled in the guise of the “new” and politically correct.</p>
<p>These journals include Carolyn Burke’s Diary, Jessa’s Journal, Willa’s Journal, Mary Anne’s “An Ongoing, Erratic Diary,” Laura’s Warm Puppy Diary,” Sabina’s Old Diaries. The list goes on.</p>
<p>From what I can tell, the gnomic injunction of your average on-line journal is two-fold and interpellative: Confess, and be true to your Self (understood here as something essential and virtuous). “Who one is,” to borrow Foucault’s once sardonic and ironic phrase, is made impervious to the cancerous threat of the fictive which is so much a part of the writing (and written) self. The on-line journals I read are not writing; they are graphomaniacal confessions which are quite blind to their own insight (ironic considering the self-reflective nature of the genre).</p>
<p>Case in point: “Coffee Shakes” by Sage A. Lunsford. Filled with nightmares, parental warfare, and Prozac, “Coffee Shakes,” like many on- line journals I have read, is overburdened with “ache” and “anger”, “veggie burgers”, politically incorrect neighbors, and the overblown environment of “feeling unaccountably terrible.” Amidst all the feeling “bone-crushingly sad” - pathos above all else - readers are told that the cat was fed wet food, sanitary pads were purchased as a fortuitous afterthought, and pop culture just sucks (compared to truly <span class="foreignWord">avant-garde</span> phenomena such as <span class="emphasis">X Files</span>, used book stores, and Ruth Rendel novels). Life is simple in this neck of the Net. Racism is bad and “pop-psych” radio shows are good. Wal-Mart, MTV, and America On-Line are “Blech”; purging personal “monsters” is healing.</p>
<p>Such is “Coffee Shakes” And as I mentioned above, it is symptomatic of the poor quality characterizing on-line journals in general. Clearly, a preponderance of these diarists are searching for a sense of connectedness with others. There is a strong urge here to confess with an odd sense of arrogance about having been bad, or beaten, or unloved. But there is also a deep need for compassion and understanding which is quite poignant. And so the guilt readers feel, coupled with their own senses of alienation and disconnectedness, keeps them clicking the page, so to speak. With each page, one moves further into the quagmire of graphomania with its overblown environment of sentimental gestures.</p>
<p>The computer is such an impersonal medium, however, that the desire to “connect” with others will always fall short. A fine journal would ironize this. Instead, we usually get the sort of self-aggrandizing myopia that fills “Coffee Shakes.” “But then, Todd and I are quite anti-social (Sarah and Todd and I like to say that we enjoy each other’s company precisely <span class="lightEmphasis">because</span> we’re all anti-social and enjoy our time alone and Sarah’s really the only person we hang out with outside the computer).” Alienation and “anti-social” feelings become as marketable a commodity as anything pandered by Wal-Mart or MTV.</p>
<p>Aside from the co-option of this otherwise historically important women’s medium, what concerns me most is the penchant these diarists have for essentializing their otherwise psychologically nihilistic identities. They do indeed constitute, in Kundera’s definition of graphomania, “a brute revolt against brute force, an attempt to free one’s ear from bondage, a frontal attack the objective of which is to occupy the enemy’s ear.” In the process - and this is the fundamental characteristic of confession - all political nuance is lost as are the subtleties of writing fiction (which, like it or not, is all we ever write when we write about ourselves).</p>
<p>In retrospect, I suppose that I shouldn’t have expected so much. After all, the computer is the most efficient, industrious, and productive creation our society has spawned. When the dust settles, when this most recent technological tumult finally quiets, I suspect we will remain one-dimensional all the same. Marcuse was so right. What seemed like great progress will prove to be stagnation, nonetheless, with the notable exception of the NASDAQ, which soared to new heights, making fantasies come true for daring high-tech investors, not adventurous Net surfers. One person’s artistic dream is another’s dividend, I suppose.</p>
<p>The ironies abound considering that sending identity adrift through the medium of writing, what Oscar Wilde might call the fine art of “lying,” seems to be increasingly intolerable among site masters these days, <span class="lightEmphasis">fiction</span> having given way to the ethical imperative that one must always present oneself to be who one “really” is. Above all, no lying! (Of course, recent government regulations will now ensure that we do not represent ourselves as more <span class="lightEmphasis">depraved</span> than good Americans should be. Is this Big Brother or a reflection of ourselves?). Indeed, the tensions of writing about human existence, the ironies of trying to write what is always ever ahead of language, are lost - the mortification of the question (Blanchot). And if it is merely superficial and trite to demand sources and continuities, centers and consistencies amidst the infinities of the net, we can say the very same about the <span class="lightEmphasis">writing self</span>, the written self. Yet amidst the growing marketplace of technological flights of fancy daring us to go where no one has gone before, one thing seems to be missing, namely <span class="lightEmphasis">writing</span>, that is, writing which, with the sweeping gesture of the fictive, allows the writing self to continually form anew.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I have found that too many on-line journals - women’s or otherwise - are simply another cog in the mode of mainstream, normative, socio-cultural identity production. What we have, then, is kitsch, albeit something far more than just <span class="foreignWord">l’art pacotilliste</span>, far more than just junk art. What we have is a facet of an overwhelming socio-cultural <span class="foreignWord">ethos</span>, a life-force and a spirit even (we can speak of the <span class="foreignWord">Kitschmensch</span> and the Kitsch-Man’s need for kitsch, as does Hermann Broch).</p>
<p>Kitsch - that is, the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at our own reflection (Kundera).</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/todd-napolitano">todd napolitano</a>, <a href="/tags/napolitano">napolitano</a>, <a href="/tags/diane-patterson">diane patterson</a>, <a href="/tags/kundera">kundera</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/nietzsche">nietzsche</a>, <a href="/tags/wilde">wilde</a>, <a href="/tags/women">women</a>, <a href="/tags/writing">writing</a>, <a href="/tags/kitsch">kitsch</a>, <a href="/tags/marcuse">marcuse</a>, <a href="/tags/sage-lunsford">Sage Lunsford</a>, <a href="/tags/hermann-broch">hermann broch</a>, <a href="/tags/foucault">foucault</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator787 at http://electronicbookreview.comGoing Gonzo: Following the Trail of the WWWenchhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/internetnation/eco-wench
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Todd Napolitano</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>So what on Earth do Hunter Thompson and film maker Jayne Loader - maker of <a class="outbound" href="http://www.publicshelter.com/main/tac.html">The Atomic Cafe</a> but also the illusory World Wide Wench at one and the same time - have to do with “ecologies”? Well, everything and nothing; like the web itself, it’s a matter of <span class="lightEmphasis">making</span>, a matter of putting-together as one will. For the World Wide Web (not unlike the World Wide Wench) is nothing if not the promise of unexpected possibilities. In fact, “ecology,” such a broad and varied term, is allowing in just this way: It is essentially ambiguous. For example, by “ecologies” does one mean environmental science, human dynamics, what? Is there, say, a literary aspect to ecology, one which would actually exceed and betray all invocations of the term?</p>
<p>First consider the popular <a class="outbound" href="http://www.drugs.indiana.edu/slang/home.html">connotations</a> of the word. Ecology: “The branch of biology dealing with the relationship between organisms and their environment.” This suggests the biological and the bodily sure enough, but such a definition then leads us to the old academic’s problem of “environment,” Nature or nurture? “Kill the body and the head will die,” writes Thompson.</p>
<p>Perhaps, then, ecology is “the branch of sociology concerned with the spacing of people and institutions and their inter-dependence.” And so one might be tempted to conclude that, in fact, ecology involves a scientific approach to human dynamics. But then this organic “branch” metaphor cannot go unchallenged, an epistemological gesture suggesting a problematic order of things and thus calling into question the extent to which we can have knowledge of knowledge, the extent to which we can know ourselves.</p>
<p>Clearly, one can trace these issues back to the very beginnings of the Western philosophical tradition. Consider, then, the <a class="outbound" href="http://www.webcom.com/paf/grk/hgreek.html">etymology</a> of the word. It comes from the Greek <span class="foreignWord">oiko</span> meaning house or, more liberally, things feminine or domestic (as oppossed to the male-dominated arena of the <span class="foreignWord">polis</span>). “Logy,” related to <span class="foreignWord">logos</span> (the term we will never escape in the wake of Derrida), I’ve always interpreted as rationale, as an order of things and therefore as the precondition of knowledge. On this account, “ecology” would suggest something more socio-political, an ongoing negotiation between public and private, between oneself and the prevalent social order, between oneself and one’s self. There are, then, a multiplicity of approaches to this theme of ecologies.</p>
<p>Perhaps more importantly, we have a theme which at one and the same time implies harmony but also conflict and contradiction. Perfect. Because this essay is about transgression and political irreverence. For it seems to me that if the Web is to provide the sort of alterity I recognize <a class="outbound" href="http://www.salomonsmithbarney.com/fin_pln/">in potential</a>, one must continually use its resources to challenge popular conventions again and again.</p>
<p>Once more: What do Hunter Thompson, Jayne Loader, and ecology have in common? Everything and nothing, and this is precisely the point. Again, it’s a matter of making.</p>
<p>When I began researching this piece, Hunter Thompson simply came to mind as somehow synonymous with “ecology,” although I’m not quite sure why. Maybe because I was teaching <span class="booktitle">Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas</span> at the time. Anyway, I took a trip to the Gonzo Links [ <span class="lightEmphasis">no longer active, eds.</span> ], a myriad online adventures probing the limits and excesses of the mind and body (the philosophical question <span class="foreignWord">par excellence</span>). There are also links to various political discussions. Indeed, for Thompson, the threshold between mind/body is the site of the body politique so to speak.</p>
<p>What strikes me about the Gonzo Links is its variations around a theme: namely, the immense <span class="lightEmphasis">possibilities</span> of perception and environment and, to a greater extent, “reality” in general. Thompson himself puts it best: “But our trip was different… It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic <span class="lightEmphasis">possibilities</span> of life in this country - but only for those with true grit” (<span class="booktitle">Fear and Loathing</span> 18). One might call this being harmful with what is best in us. “At times” writes Nietzsche, “our strengths propel us so far forward that we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them. We may even foresee this outcome without wishing to have it otherwise.” For Thompson, as for Nietzsche, life is self-becoming, continually shedding something that wants to die. Accordingly, the Gonzo Links provide doors to a splendid world of paranoia, chthonic derangement, and astute sarcasm, an environment of overblown gestures, grotesqueries, and abominations - a world in which all things great first roam the Earth in the guise of the monstrous. The Gonzo Links offer a glimpse into the beast lurking behind all that is “civilized.” We turn ourselves into beasts, says Thompson, so that we may escape the Man; yet somehow, we nevertheless arrive at the heart of mankind.</p>
<p>The Gonzo Links homepage itself embodies something of this village-fair motleyness. It is sub-divided into six categories: Panic Culture; Conspiracies; Spooks; UFO’s; Catalogs; and Paranormal. For those who like on-line publications, there are links to over 300 e-zines, the popular <span class="booktitle">Postmodern Culture</span> being one of them. Among many others, there are links to the fiction of J.G. Ballard, an <span class="booktitle">Art Crimes Index, Crash Culture</span>, and the <span class="booktitle">Surfascist Review</span>, an exciting site where the virtual Baudrillard is always a welcome guest.</p>
<p>Overall, the Gonzo Links comprise a mad departure into the madness of reality, a parodic exploration into the sovereignty of reason; that is, man and his environment, <span class="lightEmphasis">and</span> that insane presupposition “and.” As Pascal says in his <span class="booktitle">Pensées</span>, “Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” And yet, the Gonzo Links, like Thompson’s work in general, is pleasurable, albeit pleasurable in a way unacceptable to most academics. It is bodily and deranged. It is a pleasure which, as Nietzsche puts it, “tries to maintain itself by again and again changing something new into itself.” The pleasure of <span class="lightEmphasis">untruth</span> as a fundamental joy in life: This is the life principle in Thompson’s world of exiles. Everything profound loves the mask.</p>
<p>The idea that something may be true yet at the same time most harmful and dangerous - so harmful and dangerous that it may destroy the stability in one’s self - is an idea which led me to the Public Shelter site. The brainchild of film maker Jayne Loader, Public Shelter provides links to a delightfully appalling world of wanton sluts, gender ambiguity, and nuclear-age propoganda studies, including her excellent <a class="outbound" href="http://www.publicshelter.com/main/tac.html">Atomic Cafe</a> and <a class="outbound" href="http://www.publicshelter.com/wench/index.html">WWWench</a> sites. Always, though, Loader maintains an intellectual rigor both in her own writing as well as in her selection of hotlinx to other writing.</p>
<p>As you might know, Loader’s provocative, disturbing film <span class="booktitle">The Atomic Cafe</span> (1982), which she made with Kevin and Pierce Rafferty, is an unnarrated docudrama about our “love affair with the atom” as Loader puts it. But it is also “a movie about propoganda, culled from material produced by the U.S. government.” In fact, Loader and company researched over 10,000 government films, making their movie a rich archive of historical material on the verge of disappearing from sight. Of course, access to this sort of material has since been severly restricted, in part because of <a class="outbound" href="http://www.publicshelter.com/main/tac.html">Atomic Cafe</a>. As Loader reminds us, we must now rely on the Freedom of Information Act when doing such on-site research.</p>
<p><a class="outbound" href="http://www.publicshelter.com/main/tac.html">Atomic Cafe</a> site is just a small part of Loader’s award-winning Public Shelter site which includes a plethora of hotlinx to news, cybercafes, women’s issues homepages, multi-media art galleries and role-playing venues, as well as an increasing number of reviews of her work. What’s more, there are numerous links to environmental sites concerned with the environment in biological terms. Indeed, Loader is concerned with the environment, albeit in socio-political terms, specifically, the “ecology” of one’s relationship to oneself as mediated by sexuality. This is Loader’s <a class="outbound" href="http://www.publicshelter.com/wench/index.html">WWWench</a> site, an alternative universe with its own peculiar laws, customs, and politics.</p>
<p>What is so interesting about Loader is the way she abandons narrow political ideologies and fascile conceptions of power in favor of offering a replete selection of ideas, pleasures, and pains without passing judgement - this she leaves to her audience. Loader is concerned with the environmental effects of radiation, but she is just as fascinated with political issues ranging from prostitution rights, to Liberal conceptions of woman-as-homemaker, to progressive porn (<span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> an oxymoron for Loader), to the Coalition for Positive Sexuality. There are discussions about 50’s archival films right alongside links to female-centered “sex sites that don’t suck,” including Annie Sprinkle’s homepage [ <span class="lightEmphasis">no longer active, eds.</span> ], national gay, lesbian, and bisexual resources, and on-line publications like <span class="booktitle">The Journal of Sex and Sensibility</span>. At the same time, however, Loader aspires to be the consumate cyber-slut, ever on the search for “where the boys are” or that titillating piece of erotica, even if it means paying tribute of sorts to the <a class="outbound" href="http://www.cyberporn.com">Dark Brothers</a>, the anal-sex kings of net porn.</p>
<p>As artists, neither Loader nor Thompson are concerned with political polemics. That is to say, although both are quite interested in politics, they are not politicians. As artists, <span class="lightEmphasis">they do not pass judgement</span>, rather, they endeavor to create ongoing ambiguities and problematizations, not resolutions and invectives. As Loader writes, “If you believe in the intelligence of your audience, you don’t need to tell them what to think and how to process the material they’re seeing.” Clearly, both Thompson and Loader challenge the predominant conventions of mass-media <span class="lightEmphasis">and</span> academic scholarship precisely in the way they present possibilities and <span class="lightEmphasis">choices</span> above all else, a rendezvous of questions and question-marks. And possibilities imply transgression; indeed, possibility begets transgression, for things are always another way. It is a “gross physical salute to the fantastic <span class="lightEmphasis">possibilities</span> of life in this country.”</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/todd-napolitano">todd napolitano</a>, <a href="/tags/wwwench">wwwench</a>, <a href="/tags/hunter-s-thompson">hunter s. thompson</a>, <a href="/tags/loader">loader</a>, <a href="/tags/ecology">ecology</a>, <a href="/tags/gonzo-links">gonzo links</a>, <a href="/tags/epistemolog">epistemolog</a>, <a href="/tags/nietzsche">nietzsche</a>, <a href="/tags/atomic-cafe">atomic cafe</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator778 at http://electronicbookreview.comRestoring Dora Marsdenhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/antipatriarchal
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Michael Wutz</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Dora Marsden was not a madwoman in the attic. When she and her female compatriots climbed down from the attic of the Southport Empire theater on 3 December 1909 to disrupt a public appearance by Winston Churchill, she did so as a freewoman agitating for universal suffrage and gender equality. Soon she was to edit a short-lived journal by the same name, the <span class="booktitle">Freewoman</span>, to be renamed and reconceived as the <span class="booktitle">New Freewoman</span> and, eventually, the <span class="booktitle">Egoist</span> - three journals that were to have a formative impact on the literary and artistic configuration of modernism. Bruce Clarke retraces Marsden’s wide-ranging but hitherto largely unacknowledged influence on her modernist contemporaries and, in the spirit of revisionary literary and cultural criticism, seeks to correct “a tradition of misinformation” (4) that has led to a monolithic and largely masculinist construction of modern literature. Marsden, he argues, and convincingly so, was a “fugitive midwife to the miraculous birth of a literary tradition out of the ‘individual talents’ of Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, and Williams” (11), and hence deserves to be recognized for her contributions to this cadre of established modernist giants.</p>
<p>Avoiding the stale and reductive causalities of some other modernist studies, Clarke maps out the cross-disciplinary intellectual heritage of what he calls “Dora Marsden’s London” - the cultural center at debut-du-siècle Europe that (together with Paris, Munich, and Moscow) enabled modernism’s divergent impulses to coalesce into a formative critical mass. Marsden’s London comprises a rich field of intellectual currents - ranging from feminist and philosophical to scientific and popular discourses - from which her evolving thought draw substance and sustenance. The mosaic of Marsden’s thinking contains elements from Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edward Carpenter, and Otto Weininger, among many others, which she composes into a distinct intellectual trajectory of her own: beginning with an early feminist and suffragist phase, Marsden eventually developed a philosophy of egotism that subsumed her earlier concerns about gender and politics.</p>
<p>Specifically, as a “feminist retort to Nietzsche’s Übermensch,” Marsden proposed her perhaps “greatest single creation” - the “type of the freewoman” - a superhuman female fighting at the forefront of political and sexual emancipation (63). That ideal, which she espoused largely in the <span class="booktitle">Freewoman</span>, gradually gave way to a <a class="thread" href="/thread/writingpostfeminism">postfeminist</a>, but no less political, androgynous model of human selfhood, “the man-woman or woman-man who had evolved beyond the separatist dualities of patriarchal engendering” (78) and thus already signals her philosophical shift toward a theory of egotism. This shift, soon to emerge in the later portions of the <span class="booktitle">New Freewoman</span> and the <span class="booktitle">Egoist</span>, fundamentally attempts to supersede any form of typology in favor of a Bergsonian model of incessant fluidity beyond the bounds of gender, the perpetual constitution and transformation of selfhood: “a celebration of vitalistic flux in the absence of a definitive telos, an affirmation of pure existential velocity without the drag of predetermined or collective destination” (99). Through a generous sampling of Marsden’s leaders in each of her journals, as well as archival material, Clarke carefully reconstructs the evolutionary curve of Marsden’s ideas and allows readers of his book a good look into one of the most fascinating and scintillating personalities of modernism.</p>
<p>Marsden’s mercurial mind and intellectual restlessness urge a comparison with Simone de Beauvoir a generation later, or, in contemporary terms, with <a class="thread" href="/thread/writingpostfeminism">postfeminist</a> thinkers like Susan Sontag or, perhaps, Donna Haraway; and Marsden, no less than these women writers and philosophers, exerted cultural pressure on their largely male environment. One of the most fascinating aspects of Clarke’s book in this regard is his discussion of the relationship between Marsden and the presumed dean of modernist letters, Ezra Pound. Standard accounts of their affiliation have it that, when Pound joined the <span class="booktitle">New Freewoman</span> in the summer of 1913 as literary editor, he came to the rescue of an ailing journal and, once renamed the <span class="booktitle">Egoist</span>, shaped it into a crucial outlet for experimental modernism. Clarke gives due credit to Pound’s influence, which significantly altered the course of both journals, but (in an effort to complicate, if not rewrite, the canonical history of literary modernism), he demonstrates that Marsden was an assertive and strong-willed collaborator in the tug-of-war over editorial leadership and, more often than not, the driving impulse behind conceptual redirections. Marsden, not Pound, for example, proposed and saw through the name change from the <span class="booktitle">New Freewoman</span> to the <span class="booktitle">Egoist</span> (129-31), and it was largely in response to her discursive influence and the aesthetic provocations in her letters that Pound wrote what has come to be a canonical essay of modernist thinking, “The Serious Artist” (108-13).</p>
<p>Marsden’s relationship to other canonical males is less confrontational. In two fine chapters on D. H. Lawrence and William Carlos Williams, Clarke establishes a series of intriguing relays between their work and Marsden’s, discovering not direct influences so much as their joint visits to the same intellectual watering holes, such as, for example, Edward Carpenter’s evolutionary vitalism that infused their thinking with a generous dose of popularized science and cultural energetics. The chapter on Lawrence contains suggestive thermodynamic readings of <span class="booktitle">The Study of Thomas Hardy</span> and <span class="booktitle">Women in Love</span>, and while Lawrence and Marsden were, in many respects, radically at odds (the one worshiping the ego, the other crusading all of his life against it), their “common vitalist orientation, their early modernist turn - away from progressive evolutionism and toward a counterentropic emphasis on the maintenance of individual energies - are remarkably similar” (155). Unlike Lawrence, who may not have known of Marsden directly, Williams is the only major male modernist to acknowledge, in <span class="booktitle">Spring and All</span>, “Dora Marsden’s philosophic algebra.” Clarke sees in Williams’s receptivity toward Marsden an “index of his ongoing relations to creative female figures, beginning with his mother, Elena, and falling into line with his literary relations to H.D., Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore,” among others (179). At the same time, while Williams occasionally recognized his own cross-gendered artistic impulse (at one point describing himself as being “too much a woman”), he was fundamentally critical of Marsden’s intermediate theory of androgyny in an effort to “proclaim the morbidity of bisexuality, thereby to counter feelings of androgynous ambivalence and to underwrite his own masculinist investments” (199). Reacting productively to Marsden’s theories, Williams -no less than Lawrence - sought to repress his own conflicted gender identity and to establish a sexual circuit that reduces the female element to a catalytic complement for the engendering force of the male.</p>
<p>Given the discursive richness and interdisciplinary reach of Dora Marsden, it would be unfair to ask more of a book. Personally, I would have liked to know how Williams’s “residual investment in philosophical vitalism” which he shares with Marsden (209) can be located in the context of his medical training, and especially in a text - <span class="booktitle">Spring and All</span> - that is replete with pediatric resonances? Why was Wyndham Lewis not granted a room in the Egoist Hotel, the militant and egocentric editor of <span class="booktitle">Blast</span> whose philosophical beliefs were uncannily close to Marsden’s? How about Joyce, who in <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span> created one of modernism’s most famous “new womanly” men? And, more importantly, why does the fine discussion of Marsden’s anti-democratic tendencies stop short of delineating a protofascist impulse camouflaged in scientific terms that was already visible in the Italian Futurists and the British Vorticists, i.e., Lewis and Pound? But these are queries leading, perhaps, to another book, and queries important mainly to a reviewer charged with sniffing out possible lacunae and blind spots - they do not detract from the suggestiveness and integrity of this fine study. Besides, Clarke gives the answer himself: his purpose has been to restore the record, to provide a long overdue balance to masculinist modernist history, to function as a “devil’s advocate for a devil’s advocate” (10). <span class="booktitle">Dora Marsden and Early Modernism</span> does all of that, and much more. It is a countercanonical account of the history of early modernism that cuts not only genders, but disciplines as well.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/bruce-clarke">bruce clarke</a>, <a href="/tags/modern">modern</a>, <a href="/tags/spencer">spencer</a>, <a href="/tags/nietzsche">nietzsche</a>, <a href="/tags/weininger">weininger</a>, <a href="/tags/spencer">spencer</a>, <a href="/tags/eliot">eliot</a>, <a href="/tags/lawrence">lawrence</a>, <a href="/tags/williams">williams</a>, <a href="/tags/pound">pound</a>, <a href="/tags/joyce">joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/wyndham-lewis">wyndham lewis</a>, <a href="/tags/postfeminis">postfeminis</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator773 at http://electronicbookreview.comBecoming Postmodern: A Romanian Literature Surveyhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/internetnation/polemical
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Florin Popescu</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1999-01-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="longQuotation">‘…and we dare complain that our values never enter the international circuit. Well how can they appear there if before your time comes a Proust and you’re merely imitating? Every time a great writer appears in the world, Romanians immediately cease their own explorations and begin imitating. Culture is a natural force and as such it attracts towards its gravitational field those who are weak, who are devoid of hope. To escape this omen, young cultures such as ours have to make a giant effort in order to become independent, namely starting with a violent will to be polemic towards the dominating values of the west. The final aim, the burden of all generations is to transport European art and culture our way, to the East, or at least to split it in half.’</p>
<p class="longQuotation">‘It’s not possible, Petrica,’ I replied. ‘Culture is a natural phenomenon whose forces cannot be abated by mere will.’</p>
<p class="longQuotation">‘You’re fooling yourself,’said he without a moment’s reflection, suggesting he’d pondered this before, ‘Russian literature is a polemic literature, and in vain did the West attempt to ignore it: it conquered the world and now the French are gazing at the Russian soul with amazement, whose depths so mined by Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy gave them butterflies in their stomach, because they felt Russian, just as the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of a Tolstoy felt French, whose language they spoke, even in moments of intimacy…. And the Russian attack on European Literature,’ he rushed to clarify, ‘was premeditated, antagonistic, and therefore “unnatural,” though it was perfectly natural in the way it uncovered other truths about man.’</p>
<p class="longQuotation">‘Petrica, even your idea of migration of culture towards the East is unoriginal. It belongs to Spengler, only he claims it for Germany. And don’t forget that the great Tolstoy, before he got to crystallize his own reflections on the causes of war, had read Proudhon, whose idea that war was of divine origin Tolstoy appropriated with enthusiasm. If I remember correctly, he met Proudhon in 1861 in Brussels, with whom he most conversed at length, and from whom he even borrowed the title War and Peace. It seems he liked him so much he didn’t even hesitate to plagiarize. This French writer suffered, in his own turn, from the influence of Joseph de Maûtre, who shows himself an enemy of the French Revolution in Du Pape and Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg. Intellectual innovations were not brought by Tolstoy to the French, I mean outside of the fact of his overwhelming genius. Or you might say, this genius was perfectly natural, without being a consequence of a spirit which was polemic, premeditated and antagonistic.’</p>
<p class="longQuotation">I thought I had defeated Petrica in this argument, but he merely showed a spontaneous smile of superiority, waiting for Matilda to change the table settings….</p>
<p class="longQuotation">‘The polemic spirit must be oriented towards the foreign, dominant cultures, even while appropriating from them some ideas, as I don’t deny that Tolstoy did. That’s quite it, the whole world knows nowadays of Tolstoy, while that minor French figure Proudhon is all but forgotten. That’s exactly what I’m saying…’</p>
<p class="longQuotation">- Marin Preda, <span class="booktitle">The Most Beloved Earthling</span>, Volume 1</p>
<p>Describing or even introducing ‘postmodern’ Romanian literature to the western reader is a difficult and delicate task. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with all three facets of postmodernism in the west: academic, literary, and artistic. They share mostly a name and a common region of space and time. Romanian culture is an entity congruent but quite removed in both these dimensionalities. It is different in locality, as both the post-communist (a more apt title for a direct discussion of contemporary literature in Eastern Europe) sphere and the middle eastern, orthodox, and orientalist tendencies separate it via a murky chasm from the intellectual space of the industrial west of the information age. Making this unnerving journey might serve the western intellectual with not only the pleasure of discovering a foreign, ‘exotic’ culture modern in the academic sense yet archaic in the spiritual sense. The novels, journals and philosophic essays lay beyond, largely unexplored and untranslated - despite the mystery and mysticism often contained within these books’ covers, there also shines therein a wit and universality expressed by any educated writer devoted to teasing the omnipresent questions of consciousness. The authors, again, are modern in the sense of being well versed in the Western, Russian, and Oriental cultural legacies as well as competently aware of Romanian history and the work of their intellectual contemporaries, but archaic in the sense of living in an ancient spiritual order, ‘a mioritic space’ of church and village which perseveres in Romania and remains respected and admired despite being doused in the malodorous breath of forced industrialization.</p>
<h2>cultural history, in brief</h2>
<p>Although possessing ancient roots, Romania is a relatively young state and culture, with a written literary tradition in the familiar vernacular extending no further than the poetry of the 17th century, a few centuries after the tumultuous migrations of Slavs, Huns, and other sculptors of the current Europe. The beginning of literature and scholarship forged a modern language based on surviving Latin structure and a variety of imported words. As perhaps an explanation of the current mystic flavor of Romanian thought, this written literature was predated by a rich collection of peasant stories, folk songs, and Orthodox church litanies going very far back in historical time. A particular story, ‘Youth without old age and life without death,’ intimates the existentialist, time immemorial predisposition of the folk tradition. Furthermore, a complex village cosmogony of zombies and evil spirits has served to haunt modern Romania with a pesky ghost cast by a spiritualist English writer of the last century, so irremediably embedded into the Westerner’s perception of the country: the dark silhouette and wings of the ‘Count’ Dracula, actually a king or Voivod of the province of Wallachia (one of the three main regions comprising Romania, the other two being the ancient Moldavia bordering Ukraine, and the vast plateau and hills of Transylvania which was until 1918 under Hungarian occupation). Vlad ‘Dracul’ Tepes was a sadistic despot of Transylvanian-Romanian origin who merely serves to illustrate the greatest calamity of the country’s history whose effects survive today, his only real claim to immortality: he is actually a historical ‘hero’ of the constant violence affronting Romania in its conflicts with the Turks and Tatars during the late middle ages. The cafe philosopher Petre Tsutsea remarks on this hypnotic personality: ‘Man, without this guy the history of the Romanians would be a meadow with grazing lambs!’ In fact, the virility of Romanian history cherished by such right-wing philosophers is better attributed to the various occupying and attacking forces, all perpetuated by peoples with different customs and certainly very different languages. Wallachia’s (as Romania is often referred to in documents of the period) mocking and often violent defiance of the invaders led ultimately to a struggle to build a unique national consciousness among Romanian scholars and writers. Unlike the Slavic nations of the region, Romania’s powerful cousins, if any could be found among the former Great Powers, were very far away. A young, angry nation lusting for a flourish who found itself quite alone. In Tsutsea’s irreverent dictums, another characteristic facet of the national literary instinct reveals itself: for uniqueness’ sake, it is common to mix deeply held beliefs written in academic style with directness and even playful vulgarity, whose substance may often offend the liberal sensibility of the Western progressive.</p>
<h2>romanian classic literature primer</h2>
<p>Another slap in the face to postmodern sensibilities is the resilient moral conservatism of Romanian thought. In the latter 19th century, when Romanian scholars and writers undertook the task of collecting folk tales and tales of provincial life - thereby setting the foundations of a language and culture - we again see a need to extrapolate the human condition back towards the hidden, infinite pre-Christian past, termed ‘mioritic’ by philosopher Lucian Blaga. Such a condition survives, tenuously, in rural Romania today. Yet in urban culture, along with the rise of the bourgeoisie we see a sudden replay of earlier developments in the west, expressed in social satire (a Moliere and Voltaire of his time in Caragiale who satirized not only money, old and new, but inter-ethnic relations, the mixed inheritance of a new regional power, now finally independent of Russia and Turkey). Rationalism short lived, suddenly leaps the romanticism of Eminescu, the national poet of inestimable influence even in the decidedly anti-romantic late 20th century. This influence especially strong in philosophy - is blurred somewhat by the almost cult-like devotion to this brilliant tragic figure encouraged by the former Communist regime, but it is part and parcel of the ‘old’ versus ‘new’ struggle that regulates the development of culture into a smooth expansion.</p>
<h2>the modern era</h2>
<p>With the dawn of a new century and long overdue reforms such as the emanicipation of serfs, appears the most influential and prolific national writer, Mihail Sadoveanu, adding to the roman de province depth, drama, and an elegant literary style which, again, provides another pillar of written culture. In the period between the great wars, after the first of which Romania regains Transylvania and industrializes, reneging the old Tsarist model for a constitutional monarchy, a great explosion of thought and writing centers around the new, liberal, passionate, explosive Bucharest, a regional Berlin of the time, with some differences of course, but also some grave similarities. The first pivotal similarity is the influence of philosophy on every facet of artistic endeavor. Beginning with the system and school founded by Lucian Blaga and reaching a turbulent apotheosis in the Romanian counterpoint to Heidegger, the charismatic philosopher and professor Nae Ionescu, the writings of the ancient Greeks and Germans pervade most serious thought and saturate it with a passion that soon turns deadly. Ionescu and his protegees (of whom Western readers might recognize émigrés such as the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, the nihilist philosopher Emil Cioran, and the playwright Eugene Ionesco) turn towards extreme nationalism infused with religiosity, a homegrown fascism known as the ‘Legion of the Archangel Michael’, which attracted many other politicians, intellectuals, and ordinary men and women.</p>
<p>Perhaps the first glimpse of postmodernism (in the sense of literature peering outside of history but remains trapped by it) is the journal of the writer Mihai Sebastian, a student of Ionescu’s and friend of nearly all his protégées, begun soon after he published a poignant and much hated essay by the title of ‘How I Became a Hooligan’, in reply to a sudden coldness from his former mentor and his tenuous friends. Needless to say, Sebastian is a Romanian Jew. The journal chronicles a sad interior space and, with astute political and military foresight, the events of the rise of fascism, Romania’s ambidextrous role in the war (fighting alongside Germany and then switching to the emerging victors, the Russians), Germany’s rise and fall, and Anti-Semitic persecution. This last he survived, as did most Jews in Romania, writing and teaching, only to be killed in a car accident shortly before V-day, a very unique fate but one that echoes perhaps that of Bruno Schultz. A recluse Sebastian was not - he enjoyed the company of women and intellectuals, he enjoyed success. He was dismayed by the course of history and desperately hopeful about the future. He provides an antithesis to the recently published (in Romania) Ernst Junger, another WWII diary-smith who wrote from inside a German uniform, with all the paradoxical human similarities that can entail: two eyes, two hands, a penis and the bleeding heart of an Rilkean aesthete and personal moralist. Junger, the stout duty-bound Prussian, and Sebastian, the ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew, were two very different people who could have had a friendly and very interesting conversation. Tragically, their contemporaries could not.</p>
<p>This and other novels of the period, from all the countries involved in this global calamity, share with the postmodern novel we’re familiar with a ‘doom anxiety’ perhaps diluted by postwar optimism or shell-shock we’ve experienced in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Needless to mention, the danger was greater then, a hurricane that almost landed, the suffering inestimably more intense - yet it passed leaving an ambiguous cloud overhead, to softly allude to global warming. The postmodernist sources of ennui: commercialism, post-colonialism, inter-ethnic strife, and class division classify this intellectual movement to non-Western thinkers as an ‘Occidental crisis of conscience,’ almost innocent in its hypocrisy (humanism of the bourgeoisie). No discussion of Eastern Europe is complete without examining the great spectre of ‘red hell’ that cut short postwar optimism and not only provided a challenge but an inspiration to peer beyond mere politics and economics.</p>
<p>Romania’s communist era literature is not at all dulled by socialist realist conformity. It is greatly punctuated in Doestoevskyan existentialism and metaphoric protest writing. The first might not be so expected, had the influence of Russian writing not been customarily embedded into the liberal education of a Romanian writer. The existentialist paradigm that is the greatest mind game of this century was further exacerbated in the Romanian writer because of the Christian ‘mioritic’ background already mentioned, and because the problem of death in an atheist state offering few material or intellectual comforts for the short duration of a frustrated life is greatly magnified. Sartre and Camus were bothered by boredom, which continues to be the dominant problem of the West. One thinks differently when evil is a crow perched immutably on one’s shoulder, pecking at the eyes once in a while.</p>
<p>Arguably the greatest writer of this period is Marin Preda. Beginning his literary career early in his life just before the socialist era and ending just before its demise, which came, almost naturally, slightly after his own tragic end, he sought a truly universal characterization of Man and a ‘new religion’ based on humanistic principles which mollify his anguish and replace God with the Other. Never straying far from Christian ethics, he nevertheless added to his characters a need to question, to create, to write, to outreach the sticky tentacles of environment, of inhumanity, of inheritance. A prerequisite to all these aspirations is the ability to love. The so-called Predian man appears again and again in different guises: the peasant patriarch Nicolae Morometi in The Morometii who rebels against the eternity of nature and the finality of Man. ” Man is divinity chained by the power of his surroundings,” the rebellious condemned prisoner Victor Petrini declares he philosophizes and recounts a difficult life, defending the need to preserve love in the new ‘era of the criminals’ in his other highly popular novel, The Most Beloved Earthling. This confessional oeuvre, in which the ‘hero’ defends the crime for which he’s imprisoned for life, recalls The Immoralist by Andre Gide or perhaps The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo Jose Cela but only tangentially. This long novel tortures itself by exploring much more than existantialist moralisms: passion, justice, love, friendship, communism, nationalism, and oppression. The quotation from the beginning of the novel, included here, is principally an argument about the cultural identity crisis. It touches on a dispute, deleted in the English translation, about the value of popular early-century poet Tudor Arghezi, who despite his simple eloquence and concentration of national essence, is dismissed by Victor as a loveable country bard, not to be emulated.</p>
<p>Another issue on modern values central to the novel and not apparent from this paragraph is played by Matilda, who is not at all a housekeeper. She is the woman the two men, husband Petrica and acquaintance Petrini, are aiming to impress by their intellectual sabre-rattling: intelligent, powerful, vengeful, unscrupulous, careerist, and irresistible to the young academic Petrini, who steals her from his best friend and marries her despite the skepticism of his parents. This ‘new woman’ represents, it wouldn’t be a stretch to venture, the West, and the new social order dreamt up in the slums of England a century before. Matilda is of Russian heritage (the occupying power of the time). Though a party member, she keeps a nice house and a servant (Milovan Djilas’ “New Class”). Her position of nomenklatura bourgeois undermines the fact that both Communism and Capitalism are equal threats to the old social order. Both Victor, the idealistic intellectual, and Matilda, the social climber, make bad parents, untrusting spouses, and cruel lovers by the simple mechanism of selfishness, which transcends official ideology. Petrini is arrested, made slave in the mines, kills a guard and is never caught, is released through the influence of Matilda’s lover, and in the most entertaining portion of the book, tramps around the city with the rat patrol, a rag-tag collection of misfits and undesirables whom he prefers to any of the newly compromised intellectuals and their petty bosses. Throughout the rest of Petrini’s saga, the picture of communism offered by this book published during Ceausescu’s regime is remarkably acrid, yet never quite eulogizing old values, religion or the West either. Loved or hated, Preda is the most often discussed modern writer in Romania. The Most Beloved Earthling is a self-consciously philosophical novel, yet it manages to give the reader much pleasure. It preaches a lot, in phrases like ” the universe, it’s us,” yet its principal message is essentially a question.</p>
<p>Other similarly intense writers of traditional prose of the communist period stand out: the outspoken Goma, Radu Petrescu, the modern poets Nichita Stanescu and Ana Blandiana. Another type of novel also helped reprieve readers (more than usual in a developing country, due partly to the lack of other means of entertainment) of the daily frustration of poverty and the aching yoke of despotism: the allegorical novel, a creature made of wit, anger, and metaphoric beauty common to all totalitarian subjects. In the direction of the intricate and laborious we find the journal [???], Viziunea Vizuinii (The Vision of the Burrow,Marin Sorescu, 1981), which features non-linear narrative, riddles, poetry, drawings, schemata, and the like. In the direction of the ironic we find books such as the prodigiously inventive Titus Bostan the Builders of the World, a provincial novel by Petre Varlan, which features the Gulliveresque travels of a frustrated assistant soccer coach from his remote village across time and space to Elyseus, where he bribes his way to Zeus’s ear with wine, garlic, and sausage, only to be banished to Hades as a result of his anti-Olympian diatribes published in Paradise’s own sports gazette, his corruption of his own afterlife trial therein, culminating in an epoch-making soccer match between the Olympian gods and the Titans and monsters of hell. What great prose was due to follow the ‘revolution’ and its preceding output of ‘trial by fire’ art?</p>
<p>The first wave of books to be read and devoured was the previously censored (e.g. the philosophy of Steinhardt, Noica, and Tutea). A wave of semi-documentary accounts of the revolution appeared, some of which were translated to satisfy popular Western demand. Also, boastful emigre or refugee accounts were translated back into Romanian. The quality of such output is vacillating, and with time is becoming more vigorous, as the facts of the event, the secrets of the old regime, and the harsh realities of national re-adjustment are inevitably surfacing. One source of quality writing is always present: the philosophical journal (the older philosophers mentioned above and some new voices, such as Livius Ciocarlie). Then, of course, there is fiction, some about the communist era, some about the current situation. Among the more daring fiction, there is Viorel Marineasa Unelte, Arme, Instrumente, a short story collection featuring a series of stylistic tricks, such as an intriguing montage style from multiple narrators, stories in one way or another about the moral insecurity of pre-postcommunism. Another source of entertaining and vital writing began to resurface in the form of the lampooning gazette (drawing on a constant and increasing annual surplus of irony), literary journal, criticism, and political debate in the written media. Romanians love to read almost as much as they love to argue.</p>
<p>A further complication also arose through all the necessary debate: attacks against writers like Preda, deceased before the revolution, for having been atheists and successful under the regime, tempered by perhaps excessive eulogy for other thinkers persecuted by the regime for a variety of heresies, the more uncommon of which is the writer Paul Goma’s uncompromising letter of protest of the 1970’s. This attack has the dubious benefit of adding to the critical scholarship on important writers like Preda. In an intense political climate, the reader is just beginning to distance personal and political reality from the universality of art, while at the same time, literature is both written and interpreted as a maker of culture and national identity, with all the inescapable ties to value making and politics that entails. Also inescapable is the fact that publishing is dominated still by writers who were mature and active before the revolution - this lack of innocence is actually a great theme of some “post-revolutionary” writing). History spares no one, and can hardly produce great critical minds that can distance themselves from events less than a decade past. This is not a place where Baudrillard’s dictum about the arrival of the end of history holds (not to speak of Nietzsche’s antecedent dictum of similar refrain). While shepherds continue to roam hilltops in an almost photographic semblance to the last century, history will continue, feverishly even. When these shepherds begin to chat with their local sheep cloner over satellite linked cellular phones we can in turn begin to look for and analyze a Romanian postmodern novel.</p>
<p>Accelerating this process, a sudden force of inspiration for these novices has spread throughout the country. Supervised by the philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu, a publishing house named Humanitas has begun publishing and distributing not only new and old Romanian literature of quality, but also a series of impressive translations. The behaviorists among the readers may extrapolate the flavor of postmodern writing to come by a list of names appearing on Romanian bookshelves: Furet, Scholem, Todorov, Berberova, Koyre, Prygogine. Against the onslaught of sensationalist fiction, of Hollywood action movie posters, crisscrossing media waves of political bickering, a web of culture, albeit more expensive, is a welcome sight, a shield if you will. For any Romanian reader living in the West, however, the rich Humanitas catalogue is little relief - most serious fiction is spread among small publishing houses, served in small volumes - it is exceedingly difficult to build a representative collection in the West (access) as it is in Romania (cost). There is, of course, a great social and cultural benefit from the a book’s odyssey from nightstand to nightstand, by lending and borrowing. All in all, fiction publishing is prodigious, while distribution is haphazard. We are in the Balkans after all.</p>
<p>A reader’s list of Romanian fiction of any type would be far too short - almost none of the authors mentioned have been translated into English, only a few mentioned. The machine that processes thought in one language and spits it out in another is a mysterious combination of cogs. The flow of ideas is impeded by many different obstacles, human, financial, accidental, but a few rules help out anyone interested in finding out more. It helps to be living in the West in order to be published in it: consider Mircea Eliade, Emile Cioran, and in a more modern sense, the recently assassinated Ioan Culianu, whose killer eluded University of Chicago police and left us with the former professor’s works, including mystery fiction prophesying his own murder, and the monstrously scholarly and very interesting Magic and Eros in the Renaissance. It also helps to make movies from novels, as in Lucian Pintilie’s recent films (The Oak, Unforgettable Summer, and his latest, which is an adaptation from the novel Too Late by Razvan Popescu). It helps to have friends in the West. It also helps to write what the West wants to read. It is unfortunate that the mysticist element in Romanian writing was suppressed while it may have a had a healthy market in the West, although the type of credence in extra-natural forces and human destiny was and remains very much different than the Me-First orgiastic tendencies of a mantra-humming Ginsberg. While most writing is neither heavily mysticist nor mysoginist, translation is still difficult, language problems aside, because of the egg-like development of Romanian culture, its former isolation. These books contain many references to elements specific to this culture, such as the one omitted from the paragraph by Preda. This barrier can be cracked, however. The quality of a translation is often measured by the richness of its footnotes.</p>
<p>Though it is possible to publish such works, as shown by much Czech fiction, wildly popular due to its brilliance and its fit to Western tastes (a sexy smart read), the traffic of ideas is definitely tilted in the opposite direction. Poststructuralism is getting its chance to impress Easterners as we speak, a voice among many, though respected because it has a French accent. It is ironic, paradoxical even, that a liberal minded philosophy proclaiming primary equality among all modes of expression is dominant due to its powerful source, while another (Eastern) which takes ideas as anything but equal is quite easily suppressed, not just by the greater public’s resistance to all things difficult, but by the educated readerships’ tastes and education. How could this scenario not be written, if isolated voices from the ‘Ass of Europe’ (as the Balkans have been called), and from the Ass of the Balkans (as Romania has been sardonically referred to) are to pretend to compete with a group of intellectuals sitting right on the coronary artery of the continent, measuring its pulse and injecting medicine as needed? The current academic domination of the United States and France in literary and cultural matters is perhaps in some healthy jeopardy, from wherever the ‘belles-lettres’ are prized, Eastern Europe and elsewhere, perhaps most notably Latin America. The global politics of culture are an important prelude to the globalization of the economy, and no child’s play at that. Personally I hope that national identities will benefit from exchanges without name-calling and also without the plaintive ‘me too’ egalitarianism pervading American liberal thought of today. The first step of this exchange ought to be translation and distribution of stories from different tongues. Perhaps then we will see people all over the globe terrorized not merely by an anaesthesized bite on the neck of some celluloid vampire leading to neon-lit immortality but by the pesky existentialist anguish of a Cioran-ula. See you on the internet, anyone?</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/tolstoy">tolstoy</a>, <a href="/tags/petrica">petrica</a>, <a href="/tags/sebastian">sebastian</a>, <a href="/tags/sadoveanu">sadoveanu</a>, <a href="/tags/tsutsea">tsutsea</a>, <a href="/tags/preda">preda</a>, <a href="/tags/sorescu">sorescu</a>, <a href="/tags/nietzsche">nietzsche</a>, <a href="/tags/existential">existential</a>, <a href="/tags/romania">Romania</a>, <a href="/tags/russia">russia</a>, <a href="/tags/florin-popescu">florin popescu</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator703 at http://electronicbookreview.com